


Y2K Extension

by cruorecuore



Series: Copacabana [1]
Category: Friday Night Funkin' (Video Game), Pico’s School (Video Game)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe, Blood and Gore, Dark Comedy, Drinking, Dubious Morality, Explicit Language, F/M, Family Issues, Fast-paced writing, M/M, Mentions of Cancer, Murder, Not Beta Read, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recreational Drug Use, References to Canon, Schizophrenia, Self-Harm, Sexual Content, Slurs, Smoking, Two Endings, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, if u were here b4 the update pretend u ain’t seen nothin, insensitive jokes about like everything so just a warning, keith has the vibes of one of those subway surfer kids, mentions of school shootings, my brain fucking HURTS, slow build & burn, thanks kiss kiss
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-16 21:02:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 14
Words: 35,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29213862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cruorecuore/pseuds/cruorecuore
Summary: Keith walks into several gun murders.Just when he thought it couldn’t get any worse, his girlfriend’s father sends someone to kill him after a misunderstanding.He finds out that this ‘someone’ isn’t interested in killing him at all, and actually wants Keith to ditch his girlfriend and run away with him and his friends.(In the slow process of editing)
Relationships: BF (Friday Night Funkin’)/GF (Friday Night Funkin’), BF (Friday Night Funkin’)/Pico (Pico’s School), Boyfriend (Friday Night Funkin’)/Girlfriend (Friday Night Funkin’), Boyfriend (Friday Night Funkin’)/Pico (Pico’s School)
Series: Copacabana [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2162952
Comments: 153
Kudos: 216





	1. Red

**Author's Note:**

> Important: 
> 
> Everything in the tags will appear, it may or may not be as bad as it sounds, so just be careful. Also, there will be a lot of dark subjects that will be made light of (in a dark reality humor way, if that makes sense).
> 
> For example, a character romanticizes suicide/death. Just take into consideration this warning and the tags, please

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith just happens to be there when a woman is shot dead in front of his face. His first instinct is to run when he sees the cops, but he soon meets someone special who might be worth the stay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I forgot to add this in, but if you’re interested, here are the ages:
> 
> BF and GF are both eighteen, nearing nineteen. Nene and Pico are twenty two and Darnell is twenty three. The parents are uhhh,,, in their early forties? Late thirties? Idk

The day hadn’t even seemed that bad at first, but the sound (the _blam_!) had been piercing. 

Blood painted the cement like some canvas, drying in layers of maroon further inside the crown. 

It was a lot of blood for just a single gunshot on the left of the temple.

How very comme il faut on one half of the flip side. Maybe they liked that sorta thing. 

His bare palms skid across the rough texture of the street. His hand cups the steaming flesh of his forehead, fingertips grazing the clip on the velcro of his backwards cap. The coral-blue leash scratches like stitches across his knuckles. An elderly dog goes darting down the street. 

The weight of desolate fear really hits him when he makes the mistake of looking back over his shoulder (that’s easy horror 101; never look back). Various uniformed figures are already exiting their vehicles, bathing in amaranthine lights that easily reflect right off the discerning flats of facial glass. 

One is attentive. He checks the area like an arena before he spots Keith. Then he calls out to him.

Now, all Keith’s life he’d been rightfully compliant, but the image of rolling over and showing his wrists to metal for some fuzz wouldn’t fly. He was a good kid, having turned 18 just last year. He was the kind to spend all his Christmas money on junk food and spray paint the vacant sidewalks in his free time.

He couldn’t go to jail. Only naturally he’d be labeled a suspect idling around a freshly graven corpse like that. He wanted absolutely no part of it, even as a witness.

He remembers the hour prior of which he’d been lazily sprawled out over the couch, the television playing some dull sports channel, too low to be understood. His mother called for a quick night walk with Daisy, and being the good, compliant boy that he was, he strapped the canine to a leash and stepped out. 

Normally he wasn’t the type to take into mind very well the past, nor to be grateful of it (aside from the occasional parental scolding of how ‘you should be thankful that your grandmother isn’t six feet under or that you aren’t creating life in a makeshift cardboard box’), but he’d do anything to be back in that shabby little place, encircled by his half-empty spray cans and beaten-up skateboard. 

(And he also loved his grandmother, thank you very much.)

But he couldn’t think like that in the presence of a murder. Couldn’t afford to. 

Daisy was alright upon minimum scrutiny, so Keith stuffed the dog into his shirt beneath his torn, lightweight hoodie and got out of dodge. The boy escaped into a lightless alleyway, red sneakers scraping against shallow pools of rain. Piles of shedded autumn leaves crackle beneath every footstep. He catches the slight glimmer of a metal railing in the corner of his eye. It leads around the parting building right into a chain, and then a separate. He chooses the separate, which just happens to be some milkshake shop, which takes him to where he is now; talking to a fine lady (and also trying his damndest to not wheeze out a lung). 

Two or three cop cars run by the shop as he nudges himself with an elbow.

“First time?” A lady questions him, exiting the room behind the counter. She’s wearing a thin yet curve-accentuating ruby dress, her hair a deep brown and slightly wild, but in that curly model-like way. Her lips are plump and painted the same shade of her fingertips and heels, contrasting to her slightly peachy-toned skin.

Keith realizes he’s gazing.   
  


He gives her a baffled look (though, through embarrassed coughing, of course).

The woman giggles at him and reaches the counter, gestures towards the doors with a jerk of her head. “I take it you’re searching for something in particular. Shelter, maybe?”

“No,” Keith chokes out, forcibly straying his eyes from her breasts. “I don’t have any money.”

She only blinks at him.

“And I’m not a damn criminal. It was just some misunderstanding.”

“A misunderstanding?” She bends to retrieve a tulip-like glass, setting it beneath the straw of a milkshake station. Her hair flounces prettily. “Vanilla or chocolate?”

“Vanilla, and... yeah.” Keith scratches his nape.

The rooms fills with a slight metallic creak and then the machine spills out vanilla cream into the sparkling glass, swirling around until it dissolved through evenly. Keith tears his eyes away.

“I was taking Daisy, my dog, out for a walk. And this woman...” The puppy, upon coincidental mentioning, sticks her head out of the head hole in his shirt. She starts to lick at his jaw. “I think she was just some jogger.” 

The woman hummed in thought. She brings the glass, served considerably, in front of the boy and plops a cherry into it. Her silence seems to want a continuation, and Keith just had to give.

“I was on the sidewalk. She wasn’t even two feet away when someone just... went up and shot her,” Keith says.

He describes it as plainly as he could, but, of course, nothing could beat the way his mind put it out to be. It pieced every word and image he wasn’t able to describe in words into a horrifying picture. The way the blood pooled around her head, spilling like a leak in a milk gallon, the brain matter that spilt out in a soup-like consistency.

He remembers her face. The bullet wound was clean (in and out). She looked as if she’d been sleeping. 

The woman is neutrally deadpanned when she reaches out her manicured fingers to pet the dog. 

“There was so much _blood_. I never knew how much blood was in a head, y’know? I...” Keith gestures his palms wildly when he speaks, though pauses to meet her eyes for a second before he looks down at himself. “The only reason they didn’t catch me was because it was dark out. The asses didn’t use their lights.”

So much to boost his ego. 

She gives a soft, hearty little laugh at that. Her auburn eyes settle down his body for a short moment. “Well, you must’ve been quite the runner considering they have cars and you’re on foot.”

Keith snorted.

It didn’t even seem like she was bothered by what he’d just said. Perhaps she thought it was a lie? 

No, all those cop cars was enough to be his damned alibi. Maybe she’s just seen a dead body before. And, well technically, this wasn’t his first.

The red-clad woman slides him a packaged straw, however, with a smooth, unfazed, “Enjoy.”

Keith smiled cheekily, although it felt somewhat forced. “I’ll repay you one day.”

Her red lips stretch out into a corresponding smirk.

“Do you work here?” Keith then immediately asks, opening the straw and sticking it into the milkshake.  He doesn’t wish for the conversation to end (it was a good distraction from the gore-y image stuck in his mind), so he chokes up whatever question that brims in the shallow depth of his head.  That, in turn, earns him a funny look. “I mean... do you work here alone?”

“Well, currently, yes. It was my parents’ place originally, though. They just passed it down to me once they procured those precious positions in the business.”

He’s still lightly colored pink as she rolls her eyes. He knows what that’s like, kind of. Well, not to have a father but to have someone that cared a bit too compassionately for a job than a child. 

Keith liked to think that he was worth more, though. 

The woman sits herself on the other half of the counter, neatly crossing her legs as she looks around thoroughly. “I might sell the place. I’ve always been the _traveling_ kind of gal.”  


“Sweet,” he lazily beamed, taking a sip from the milkshake. “I also like traveling.”

“Yeah?”

“Me and ol’ Daisy, here, would go on rides on my skateboard.”

“Precious.”

“Psht,” Keith chortled. “Didn’t catch your name there, by the way.”

“Amelia.”   


“I’m Keith.”   


“Well, hello there, ‘ _Keith_.’” The boy is then filled with self-sufficient satisfaction. 

Since the milkshake machine was out of use, the drumming had cooled off into silence, omit the low hum of the radio sitting on the other end of the table. It’s some quiet, indecipherable rap from what he could tell. Amelia is bobbing her leg to it slightly, also nodding to it. Must be a familiar tune?

“You must really like red, huh, Ams?” Keith looks around. At first he thought that he just might’ve been hallucinating upon stepping in the room, but the place really was all red, just in varying. 

The stools are crimson, the swerving countertop is a deep wine, the dimmed neon lights with curvy letters shining a sexy red all over the room. A majority of the walls are glass, decorated with (you guessed it) red cursive writing. He couldn’t make out what it read since it was written backwards, though.

Amelia smiles. “It’s my family’s favorite color. And also mine.” She gestures again with her pointed chin. “You must like blue.”

“Blue?” Keith furrows his eyebrows, but then it hits him. “Oh, haha, yeah. I meant for it to be like a natural green, but... it came out like this.”

“Well, green isn’t really a natural hair color, now is it, small boss?”

“Hey, you know what I mean.” The two smile at one another, much like an elderly couple. Keith easily felt the connection there, kind of like one of those fictional red strings tying itself around his pinkie, though, he knew this was reality.

And reality isn’t often that kind. 

Keith finishes up the vanilla bean some long, cheerful moments later, leaves the cherry in the glass of which Amelia snatches and ears up. His eyes are on her lips as she does such, but the words mumbling out are much more disappointing than he anticipates. “Well, I’ve gotta close down. It’s late.”

Keith nods in affirmation. Of course it’s late. But his eyes are heart-shaped, and he couldn’t quite fucking leave, so he stands up as reluctantly as he could.

Amelia curved around the table, purposefully (or maybe not, the blue-haired boy wasn’t sure) swaying her hips. He watches her flip the sign, heels tapping. “I can escort you out, if it’ll make you feel a little less afraid?”

“I’m not afraid,” Keith responds, a bit too hastily. Amelia raises a brow (‘sure’), and escorts him out anyways.

“I’ll come back,” he promises her with an assuring nod, gives one of those fuckboy smirks.

She gives him one right back. “Catch you later, champ. Watch your feet.”

Keith chuckles. And now, present-day timing, here he is; blue-haired teen out in the lonely, cold streets with an old dog hugged to his chest. The warmth on her patches of fur does bring some comfort, though not much. 

He’d never really been in this part of town, actually, now that he looks a bit clearly. A sign in the corner reads Heaven Street, a bit ironic given how this was one Amelia’s place sat on. 

She was an angel sent to him, he guessed. And was definitely into him. He’d totally come back, but with his wallet. He’d make sure to pay a little extra, too. 

Keith nudges his backwards cap down to hug his forehead. The gusts of wind had gotten stronger. Winter was approaching and yet, he stayed wearing shorts and hoodies. He wouldn’t wear winter coats even if he had them. Hell, he didn’t wear any paddings when performing skateboard tricks, which was why the skin on his legs were always so regularly fucked up.  
  


  
At least he could do a kick-flip.

The boy’s caught off guard with some chatter, evidently out of sync (about two or three guys?). As he turns the corner, he’s able to make out the figures. They look about his age, and they’re heading right towards him.

Or maybe that’s just the panic settling in.

Keith sees the group is clearly disinterested in even looking his way, but that doesn’t stop one from falling towards him— an attempt to trap him hard against the concrete. Keith dodges it with a second left to spare. The man cracks his face against the ground. The two other guys stare in horror, but not long is lost until they follow suit.

The severity of the situation doesn't seep into the depths of his mind as good as the realizations had. There was that sound again, the _blam_! but there were several of them. Three. His ears are ringing.

Blood is splattered over his shoes. A speck hits his cheek.

And there he thought everything would be alright? The world really is unkind to him, sometimes.

Keith screams, and there were no cops around to hear him. He feels as if he’s been yanked beneath water, seizing all the air in his lungs, leaving him to wither. Daisy clambers out of his trembling hands, and she instantly goes to sniff out the bodies out of pure, aged interest.

There’s a flash of air at his side. He wonders for a quick-lived instance if its his time to go (maybe the afterlife was better than time after time, horror after horror). He looks up, eyes as wide as hand mirrors.

Steel blue eyes stare right back into his black, terror-stricken pair. He doesn’t pay it all too much mind. He’s given up on the world, anyways.

The person grins at him.

“First time?”


	2. Blue Bird

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith returns home safely but reminisces everything in a not-so-safe manner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pico’s an asshole, but you really should’ve expected that.

The first thing he does when he walks through the front door is kick off his shoes and unhook Daisy from her leash, and then for rational reasons, he heads straight for the shower.

  
Or at least _tries_ to.

“Where were you?” His mother hounded, but if anything it sounded as if she was more irritated than worried.

To be completely real, he expected that so he meets her eye directly. “Friend’s house.”

“Why couldn’t you call me and let me know?”

“I left my phone here.”

“If you knew that, why would you go to a friend’s house?” 

“I don’t know, mom.” The blue-haired teen forces his way around her, but something in his fucked-up mind tells him to be a little bit kinder. It isn’t her fault he saw what he did. “Uh, last minute decision. It started to rain.”

But if it’d been raining, he’d have been drenched. And somehow, she doesn’t notice. 

He wasn’t particularly skilled with facades, it’s just much easier to use false mockery within his age. There isn’t much difference from 17 and 18, really.

(That’s pretty much the age where you lie a lot, or brush family love off like some flea.)

When Keith shuts the door her footsteps pause right outside. He turns the shower knob with an audible creak and starts to peel off his clothes stinking of sweat, when she says something along the lines of wanting to chat later. He stilly responds, “I gotta piss,” but jumps into the shower to piss there instead. 

The nozzle sprays out cold water, to which he flinches beneath. He could hear her walk away from the bathroom (probably to go right back to her study room and ignore him for the rest of the day), but that didn’t stop the lump of guilt in his throat.

They aren’t close, he and his mother, but he was still somewhat grateful to have one. His deadbeat of a father left the minute Keith decided (just at the age of 13) that skateboarding was way cooler than fucking _baseball._

“ _Every kid in my class skateboards,” he remembers telling his dad that one day, the day the man let go of all his internal (years of pent-up) anger. “I’ll be one of the losers if I don’t get one. No one even plays baseball.”_

_“And you think I give a fuck?”_

_Keith cowers behind his mother._

From then on, he proceeded to play baseball and listen to other kids chat regularly about skateboarding, until on his birthday one late evening, his mom gave him a skateboard.

He was happier that day than he’d been that whole year.

When his father finds out, Keith had genuinely expected the man to have changed his way of thinking, maybe let the boy explore his interests and live the way he wanted. But he had been wrong. Of course he’d been wrong.

His father leaves after chucking the damned thing and striking Keith’s mother, doesn’t come home anymore after that. Keith is thankful for that. He spews out all his frustration decorating the cut-up skateboard with various cans of spray paint, the ones his late grandfather used to fix cars (it was a family lineage, kind of thing. His dad also worked on cars), but not after helping his mother bandage up her blemished eye.

It’s turquoise on the front, white-out on the back, the skateboard, a consciously messily-drawn, bright red prohibition sign right over it (in his head, that sign stood for rebelling and protecting what was his own.) 

You’d think after having a birthday go so well like that, he’d have the worst year continuation, but it’s quite the contrary. He learns tricks and jumps, goes to every local skatepark to make friends with girls and dudes, but he soon taught himself how to outrun people on a mere plank with wheels after a wide-shouldered store owner caught him staining a sidewalk with paint.

He’d never thought that he’d be running from the police for something he didn’t do, however (not that the police ever caught him and his little prohibition signs. They hadn’t).

Keith cranks the heat to boiling, wants to feel a bit more in control of his life, but in turn, steps out from beneath the spray to rub dye-protective shampoo into his hair. The room quickly steams up by all the heated water, fogging up the mirror behind the shower curtain. 

He grasps a hand on the railing inside the tub (there’s a shower inside the tub, and only one bathroom cause they aren’t exactly _rich_ ) after feeling a bit dizzy. It was put there when he was a kid so that he didn’t drown, but it stayed because the boy never seemed to stop slipping.

He thinks it’s just because he has a big head— it never did die down a size even through puberty.

All the pressuring heat and no cool, fresh air was making him feel closeted in a tight space, on the other hand.

His hands are shaking. Grabbing onto a railing wasn’t the best thing to do, cause it leads him back to the events of today, but then again, following that trail led him to meet Amelia. He smiles knowingly, which was kind of creepy considering his current whereabouts, so he stops doing it.

Smoothing a hand down his nape, Keith stepped back beneath the water after setting it to a room-temperature cool, he washes out the shampoo. 

He’d never seen such a pretty girl before.

Thinkin’ about it makes him feel like a fucking loser, but it was _true_.

He’d seen pretty girls his age before but Amelia took his breath away, made him momentarily forget about all the pain he’d been _so lovingly_ given. Maybe he’d even go back tomorrow— well, later, technically, as it had to be around two in the morning.

Keith wrings out some water from his brightly-colored hair before just fucking dousing it in conditioner. He didn’t know if it was the color or if his scalp was just naturally dry, but his hair had the consistency of a stale, fried wig as the day progressed. As much as it pissed him off, he couldn’t blame anyone but himself for styling it so irregularly so regularly.

Maybe he should revert back to its original color? It’d help him blend into crowds on the good side.

Keith jumps out of the shower after scraping himself with a hefty amount of soap. If he stayed any longer, he knew he’d fall asleep. Stress does that to a person. 

He pours soft food into the dog bowl by the back door for Daisy. Since she was approaching her 16th birthday, that was really all she could eat. He felt bad as he watched her slightly limp over to the bowl. She was blind in one eye and partially paralyzed in a hind leg.

Everyone says that’s a normal way to feel, but Keith just thinks he might have a soft heart. That doesn’t stop him from denying it, of course.

He decides against eating and goes and lounges on the couch, clicks the TV on but that’s a mistake. The first channel it flashes on to is a news channel. Keith gazes with a silent breath.

* * *

  
  


“First time?”

Keith blinks after a long moment of not doing so (not being _able_ to do so). His eyes slightly burn. 

A person, a man is looking down at him, their shadow looming over him like some ghost. And it was as equally chilling. His eyes are a very light blue, almost glowing white by the light shedded from the moon.

“What the fuck?” Keith stutters out, taking a step back. 

The man appeared severely unfazed, in fact, he took a step closer. Keith’s eyes lock onto the person’s jaw. His grin is eerily stretched out, two or three teeth missing here and there.

The man smoothly alters the wicked grin (thank, god) into a thin smirk, one that clearly mocked the blue-haired teen. His eyes _slowly_ glide down to the puppy at their feet, sniffing the bodies. “This your dog?”

Keith swallows every emotion he’s feeling (anger, fear, shock) down, along with the slight taste of vomit. “You... you just fucking killed them!” 

The ginger, Keith can now see in better lighting, bends down on his haunches, still wearing that smirk, reaches out a palm to pet Daisy. Keith watches as he strokes her a little too compassionately. 

“Hey!” Keith feels his fists start to clench, the nail biting skin. “Don’t fucking touch her!” 

“So she is yours,” the ginger man says. His voice is moderately deep, a bit grating and kind of muffled. “She’s kind of ugly.”

Keith watches the stranger tilt his head. “No... actually, very fuckin’ ugly. Damn. Is this even a dog?”

A part of Keith’s mind wants to defend Daisy, the soft part indefinitely. He doesn’t, for obvious reasons. He can’t seem to keep his eyes off the bodies, though, red, and so much of it, spilling out all over the streets, though it looked black. One of the guys had landed on his left cheekbone, leaving his entire right side to Keith. His eyes are still open and so _alive_ -looking.

It was so unusual. Why did the dead always appear as if they were either sleeping, or in some sort of trance?

The stranger straightened himself to his full height, topping the teen by a few inches. He stares at Keith, but when he sees the teen isn’t returning the action, he follows his gaze to the pile of bloodied bodies. He smirks, his eyes slowly moving back.

Keith swallowed the urge to puke once more before just about ripping his eyes away. He was only fucking himself up more. His gaze settles back on the stranger. A bitter chill all but stabs him right in the torso. 

He’s looking right at him. No, the man doesn’t even blink.

Keith notices a slight shimmer in the left of the man’s pocket, sticking out like a gem. It was exactly what he wished it wasn’t, but everything he knew it was; metallic and heavy. A handgun. 

This man killed these three, most likely innocent, guys. Wait. His eyes widen. He might’ve even killed that jogger!

“Damn... your eyes are like fuckin’ dinner plates. Did you finally realize you’re past your mother’s curfew?” 

“You killed these innocent people, for what?”

“I didn’t kill them.”

Keith squints at him, grinds his teeth at the image of the ginger’s cocky little smirk. “You have a fuckin’ gun, bro, like _hell_ you didn’t!” 

“Why’re you looking there?”

Keith goes silent.

For once in his life, he wished he had a gun, just so he could ram it right between this fucker’s mouth and take out the rest of his teeth.

He wouldn’t shoot, though. Of course he wouldn’t. He was still a good kid.

This man uses an innocent, yet mocking tone. Like some parrot hearing a person speak. It was infuriating. 

Keith doesn’t feel like getting a bullet lodged into his bloodstream, so he turns on his heels and leaves, but not after wiping his face a little too roughly with his palm. The world, in his eyes, shake a little bit. It’s a bit fuzzed on the edges. It’s like he’s overdosed himself with an adrenaline shot, heart pumping and shit.

“Hey,” the person calls out to him, though it wasn’t quite a shout nor even near a whisper. Keith does everything in his power to ignore him. “You forgot your mutt.”

Oh, yeah. Daisy.

Red-faced, out of plentiful mixture of rage and embarrassment, Keith whirls on his feet and picks the dog up. He doesn’t dare look the ginger in his hooded, practically all-white eyes because fuck that, for one. And two, he wanted to go home.

  
So he did. And he cried along the way (if you could call his eyes blurring up immensely, but no tears actually falling, _crying_ ). Keith dragged the outer of his palm across his eyes, adjusted his cap, gave Leia’s Diner one last glance and walked right home. 

He doesn’t hear another gunshot that night. At least no other innocent person loses their life. Now he could go home and contemplate his.

Keith’s heart starts to beat, not that it wasn’t already beating fast, because it never really slowed since that encounter. He now knew what the killer looked like. He could report them, but... He glances down at Daisy. The cops were on the lookout for him, not some ginger freak. 

Keith curses to himself. He kicks the door open. 


	3. Chains

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith returns for a milkshake (nah, really just for his technically gf) and ends up meeting her parents.

Keith exits the garage for the second time that entire day, though skidding on his skateboard and not inside to eat an entire family-sized bag of chips.

The place turned into a haven ever since his dad had left (but not after taking his car and tools with him, the greedy motherfucker. Keith made sure to destroy a few of the tools the man had forgotten). 

He hooked up his old, but perfectly good TV so that he could watch lame reality films as he practiced his painting. The combo allowed him to pick up quite of few interests, that being motorcycles and tattoo art. 

It didn’t sound all too different from what he did now. It was basically just an upgrade (graffiti to tat-art, skateboard to motorcycle, just really basic but cool shit).

A good amount of red and turquoise still dotted Keith’s hands from the process of repainting his skateboard (the paint had started to chip off). He was too lazy to wash it off, so he let it be.

At least the thing looked a bit brighter. If you were up close, that was. And also if you flipped it upside down, but it was whatever.  


Keith took a foot off the skateboard to drag against the street to speed up just a bit. He tightened the drawstrings of his rose-colored hoodie, yanked the hood up over his head where a black hat sat instead of his usual red one.   


It wasn’t much but he wouldn’t take the risk— as much as he liked them.

See, his mother worked primarily screen time, so whatever information they put out there, of course she’d see it. The information that _had_ been put out there was brief (man somewhere in his twenties dressed in dark clothing), so he switched it up. 

He found that funny.

If you tell people to search for an individual in dark clothing, that’s the only fuckin’ thing they’ll search for. Well, at least in his fucked city. 

It’d been a couple of days since that... could you call it a fallout? Yeah. The fallout 

He coped somewhat decently.

(He really just weighed it in with his grandfather’s funeral.) 

If you excluded the occasional nightmares. He didn’t get many of them, but when he did (of course) it was traumatizing. But really, he found that his brain, when he wasn’t unconscious, and his thoughts were twice as dangerous than when he was asleep.

You know that thing people do with their brains? They create more things to think about, or worsen whatever it was that was already fucking them up internally? Yeah, that.

His solution was to sleep a lot more so that he wouldn’t have to deal with it, for the moment, at least, because he always woke up afterwards.

The whole thing pissed him off but it was gradually working.

He heard a phrase somewhere when he was a kid, to ‘always look on the bright side,’ which was what he was doing. Sorta.

He got out of the house, for once... To buy himself a milkshake. Yup.

Call him a dumbass, but he just really wanted to speak to that girl again, even if it meant traveling back to that spot where all that shit happened. 

If he got mugged, at least he got her number.

Keith steps off of his skateboard, hooking it between his elbow and hip as he pushed through the door into the diner.

The way there had been surprisingly okay— minus the old ass lady with her hands on her hips, just standing there on the sidewalk, shouting at him to stop creating a ‘disturbance.’ 

(He made sure to do a kick flip right there, and then rode even faster when she threatened to call the cops.) 

“Amelia!” Keith smirked. The woman was behind the counter (and also looking nice) as per usual, clad in a deep red top, curly hair out and swept aside. “Lookin’ great.” His eyes trailed. “As always.”

Amelia looked up the moment she heard her name be called. She began to smile at the sight of a certain blue-haired dude. “This is like the third time we’ve talked.”

“Won’t be the last.” 

She waved a hand, got off the counter chuckling. Keith sits himself on one of the stools, leaning his skateboard on the metal leg of the chair at his side. Keith plopped both his elbows atop the table, leant a bit forward.

“How ya’ been?”

“Great,” Keith lazily grins. Images of dead bodies flash in his brain, but he pushes them aside to the best of his ability.

Amelia is in the process of creating him another vanilla milkshake, though she glances right over her shoulder, gives the guy a good once-over. “Like the hoodie.”

“For real?”

“Yeah,” she turns back around. Keith gets a glimpse of her backside. “Though, I didn’t quite take you for the pink type.”

Normally, guys don’t like wearing pink, purple, or even red, but to Keith, colors are colors.

His hair is bright blue, for fucks sake. 

Keith chuckled, but also slightly snorted at the same time. “When I got it, I liked what it was made out of.” 

“What, cotton?” 

“Boyfriend material,” Keith coughs.

Amelia snorts. She expected that kind of behavior the moment she locked eyes with the guy.

She lands him his drink, gives him a cherry again even though he hadn’t touched the first one. She breathed lightly through her teeth, leaned onto the counter as though she were stressed. “My parents are coming in later.”

Keith took a noisy sip, brow raised, eyes rounded in interest.

“They wanna try to re-convince me on keeping this place. Something about it being passed down when I have children.”

“Will you?”

“Hm?”

“Have children?”

“Dunno,” Amelia replied after a moment of thinking. It was written on her face that she genuinely wasn’t sure.

Keith doesn’t blame her.

He’d hate it too if his father pressured him into having kids just for the sake of keeping up all the car-repairing shit in their family bloodline. 

“I mean, I’m still young now, but I don’t see myself giving birth anytime soon.” 

Keith mixes the ‘shake around with his straw. “How old are you?”

Amelia glances over at him.

Keith feels his face redden, heart picking up a beat. “I mean... not to be rude or anything, you don’t have to—”

“I’m eighteen,” she smiled at him. Keith just knows she’s internally laughing at him.

He glances down at his lap. “Uh... s-same.”

There’s a small amount of shuffling, which was _something_ because he couldn’t really handle all the awkward silence. Just as he goes to sip his drink, she spoke up again, “You should stay and meet them.”

“Who?”

“My parents.”

So soon? They just met!

Keith chokes. Some drops of vanilla shake stains the counter. Amelia doesn’t look at him all judgmental or shit, but she does look a bit surprised. “I’ll go get, uh...”

“No, I got it.” Now she just looked amused.

The whole ordeal doesn’t help with all the blushing in his face. If anything, it made it worse. 

The woman has a rag pulled, cleanly wipes the counter in one smooth motion but goes back for a second. “They aren’t mean people. They’re just,” she pauses, “a bit... strict.”

“A bit?” Keith almost squeaks. 

Amelia shrugged, let out an exhale and puts the rag in a bucket of water to wash it. “I mean, every parent is strict in some way.”

“Yeah, that I get.” He thinks of his father instantly. Keith wrinkles his brows, gripping the glass of the milkshake. 

It’s not that his mother was particularly strict— she wasn’t— she just slightly questioned everything that he did. It was just sheer curiosity, and Keith can’t blame her, he’d do the same if he had kids.

He just wasn’t sure if his father was strict or not, or just a plain asshole. Maybe both?

His dark eyes glance for the classic clock sitting on the wall to the right of them. Right in the center is a face. He, or it, had reddish-pink skin, oversized sunglasses, and a blue tongue. It kind of looked like a demon. Anyways, the time read 4:54 in the afternoon. 

“I could.”

“Really?” Her brown eyes glimmer with excitement. They aren’t even dating, but it felt as if they _were_.

Keith swallows. “Don’t see why not.”

Amelia smiles, patted his forearm, takes and eats the cherry from his drink. “I’m sure they’ll love you.”

“Does that mean we’re a thing?” Amelia had been starting to get up and leave his side to tend to another customer, who had gotten there just now (of which Keith hadn’t noticed at all), when he abruptly blurted that. He opens his mouth to apologize, but he watches her slyly smile.

“Do you wanna be?”

“Yes!” He nearly shouts.

Amelia laughs, goes to serve the customer who was currently staring bug-eyed at Keith like he was new off the news. Keith glared back, but it doesn’t last very long as he goes text his mother a message about staying out a bit later.

Her reply is just a mere ‘ok.’

Keith shuts off the phone. Luckily in time, Amelia had finished serving the customer a vanilla and chocolate-mixed shake. She stands right back in front of him, leans against his counter. “Y’know, since I’m the only worker here, how about you start here, too?”

“Wait, really?”

“Yeah! I mean, the place is hardly ever busy, and the customers are usually just regulars.”

The place was rather chill.

“Sure,” he grins, nodding. 

“Sweet! Can you start tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?!” 

“What?” She frowned, confused.

Keith hadn’t worked in a while, just to put it out there.

It wasn’t that he had an issue with working here (he absolutely did not. They’d be the only two here, which was _great_ , believe him), it was the location. And the street. And the regular fucking crimes that happened on _this particular_ street.

He could just find another job and still come here in his free time to see her, but his mouth files out a, “Sure.”

“Awesome!”

She tugged at his heartstrings a bit too hard for him to be able to say no. He smiles and watches dreamily as she goes to tend to another customer.

This one looked funny as hell. Blood-red spiked hair, a chained-spiked collar.

They kind of eyed him oddly. Keith couldn’t really tell why or in what way from this distance, but he shrugged it off, opens a gaming app on his phone.

Arrow Keys.

* * *

Amelia’s parents hadn’t been anything he expected at all.

He imagined them to be a slightly old, slightly judgmental, but a still sweet couple.

Boy, the fuck was he wrong.

Her mom is tall, had to be around 5’10, excluding her damn heels. Amelia looked like a direct copy from the woman. The same long, curly brown hair, the same hooded eyes. In her hand was some luxury purse, the same merlot color as her business suit that accentuated her natural figure (and also actually made her a lot more intimidating).

Her dad was another story, however.

The guy looked nothing like Amelia. He, too, was in a suit, though all black with some red touches here and there. His hair is like a blueish grey, and very oddly styled.

It kinda looked like devil horns. He looked the type to kill his daughters’ boyfriends, anyway.

Keith takes off his hood, and then his hat, hair flouncing out, then he gets off the stool. If he was gonna meet them, he might as well do it properly.

The man instantly got up in Keith’s space, eyeing him down like he’d threatened him in some way.

Amelia rushes out from behind the counter, not shocked in the slightest but evidently annoyed. “Dad, stop it.”

“You interested in my daughter?”

“Dad, you’re scaring him!”

Keith felt like the world’s number one bitch, but damn, was he afraid, not to mention the guy was like 6’5, an entire foot taller than himself. 

“What? This the little punk you’ve been talkin’ about?”

She’d been talking about him? Keith’s ears felt as if they twitched. He was more affected by that than the crude nickname. 

“People are looking, dad.”

The father playfully nudges him with little to no force, but the blue-haired boy still goes stumbling back. The guy laughs. “M’ just messin’ with ya’.”

Keith still rethinks his decision of ever coming back here.

“What’s your name?”

“Uh... K-Keith.”

“What was that?” His voice rumbles, fucking naturally booms.

“Keith, sir!”

“Oh, gettin’ all military on me now, boy?” He’s joking with him, but Keith still fears for his life.

“Sorry.”

Keith can’t help but also think the man was kind of like a coconut. Hard on the outside, but sweet and soft on the inside. Keith doesn’t know why he’s so afraid of him, still. Maybe it’s the shoulders. Or the beard.

Regardless, he buzzes the guy out to see that Amelia is chatting lowly to her mother, who appeared relatively annoyed. Was it about him? His brows furrowed, but the dad took him off guard by throwing a large palm on his shoulder.

“M’ name is Luis, and this is my wife, Angela. This is our dearest daughter, Amelia.”

...Who the fuck still talks like that?

Keith smiles, waves towards the mother, nonetheless.

She outright scoffs at him.

His smile starts to fade.

“Have you exchanged phone numbers yet?” Luis asks him, unfazed by the mother’s coldness. Maybe that was just her character.

( _Or_ , she just didn’t want her daughter dating a ‘lame ass’ like him.)

“We aren’t dating, sir.” Keith doesn’t use the word ‘yet’ because he isn’t ready to sleep in a coffin just yet.

“That’s great!” Luis looks happy, and Keith can tell he isn’t faking it.

Keith looks down to the hat clenched in his hands, and then his pocket where his phone sits, hidden. “Uh... is it alright if I do?”

The guy deadass ignores him. “Amelia!”

The girl looked over, as did her mother. She starts to head over, a scary woman at her side, though just a tad slower. “Hm?”

“Have you changed your mind about the diner, yet?”

Amelia’s naturally chill face depleted a bit, but not much. Keith is gazing, open-jawed because he isn’t sure how Amelia turned out to be so short with two giant parents.

But she’s still taller than him, so it doesn’t even matter.

“No, _buuut_ Keith, here, will be working with me soon.” 

Keith snaps back into reality. Why did she say that? Perhaps they might’ve needed to know, since technically the building was under their names, but _still_.

The parents stare at him in sync. Amelia is the opposite, though, all happily smiling. 

“Really?” The mother, Angela, says. Her voice is unimpressed. It really scares him.

“Yeah, he’ll start tomorrow.”

That’s right. He does start tomorrow.

He won’t stay for long if the parents plan on dropping in every day he was there, though, so they don’t have to worry about it for long.

“Well, at least you’re still in the place.” The mother moves a strand of hair behind her ear, the golden bracelets on her hand ringing.

“You should _keep_ the place,” the dad insisted, with a punchable smile.

Amelia rolls her eyes. “We talked about this, dad. I want to travel.”

“I know, I know.”

The two babble back and forth for a few minutes, and during the little argument, Keith notices that the mother’s been eyeing him strangely the whole time. Beyond strangely, actually.

She’s judging like every centimeter of him. Her eyes then narrow.

He flinches. A hand lands on his shoulder, and he flinches again.

“Well, as much as we’d love to stay, it _is_ our lunch break. We outta return.”

They skipped their lunch break to come here and intimidate the fuck out of him? _What absolute tryhards, dude._

Keith looks up to see that Luis is looking down at him. He restricts the urge to flinch again (maybe that’d earn him a bit more respect). “Uh... it was nice meeting you both.” 

Luis grins at him, and Angela just stares. Amelia flicks him a secret thumbs up, just right out of view from the two. 

They don’t shake his hand when he hesitantly offers it. They just wish their daughter a goodbye, hug or kiss her or whatever, and then leave the diner.

As soon as they’re gone, Keith turns his head so fast he almost snaps it. “You called them here!”

Amelia couldn’t help the laugh slipping out. 

“I... I could’ve died!”

“Don’t be so dramatic. They liked you!”

“That is absolute bullshit. They hate me.”

“I know,” she sighed, smiling.

“And you didn’t tell me you were rich!”

“Oops,” she giggled. “ _Sorry_.”

Keith huffs, glances back to the clock.

It’d been a few hours since the first time he checked it. It hadn’t even felt like it, though. This also sounded real cheesy, but he lost his track of time whenever he was with Amelia.

“There isn’t a uniform.”

“Huh?” Keith turns back around.

“Tomorrow?”

“What?” His face scrunches.

“Your first day of work, silly.”

Oh, yeah. Damn, he’s real stupid.

“Damn, I’m stupid,” Keith scratches his neck. Amelia chuckles, automatically agreeing with him. “Then, what _do_ I wear?”

“Red. That’s it.”

“I really should’ve expected that.”

“You should’ve.”

Keith helps her close the place down for the night later, after more milkshakes and cherries. He watches her flip the ‘open’ sign as he crouches to retrieve his skateboard.

She escorts him out again, but this time it’s a bit down the street where there’s an intersection of even more streets.

“It was nice talking to you, Keith,” Amelia smiles at him.

It felt like a love story, but it was (maybe) the night chill that makes him shudder. 

“Yeah,” is all he can say. 

She waits a good moment for him to say something else, say something more, but he doesn’t. She grants him one last smile, lipstick-painted lips stretching. “Well... see you tomorrow, casanova.” 

Keith waves awkwardly. He watches her turn around and leave. Oddly enough, she has the same walk as her parents; quick yet sassy. And also rich.

He wishes he were rich.

And _speaking_ of money, he forgot to pay her. Keith turned around to see that the girl was long gone, which was weird considering the street ran down straight, lacked a turn for a good mile.

He sets his skateboard down, slides on his hood over his black cap and kicks off into a stride.

Somewhere along the way, he messages his mother that he’s nearly home and she responds with a near paragraph about him being two hours later than he promised he’d be.

  
At least he was alive. And he didn’t get mugged. No weird guys with guns in his face, either.

But he _did_ _also_ forget to ask for her number. He could do that tomorrow. Just hopefully, when he messaged her, it wasn’t one of her parents that answered. 

Keith goes straight home to eat dinner. He tells his mom about finding a new job, and that there was a cute girl that also worked there.

His mother’s computer is situated right on the table next to her plate. She doesn’t stop typing even as she shoveled rice into her mouth. “That’s great.”

He knows she isn’t talking to him. She doesn’t even hear him, so he doesn’t waste time in going upstairs once he’s done. 

He makes the mistake of watching TV for the rest of the night in place of sleeping. 


	4. Balloons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> BF settles in working with GF, and they stumble upon two Halloween-y ass kids.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A second filler, mainly a build up for the next chapter (which will have a bunch of actually interesting shit, I promise) that might be posted later today. I have a lot of free time currently and I don’t sleep often, so this story will be updated relatively quickly.

He fights around in the blankets for a moment, cussing about the siren-like screech of his phone alarm. He’d have to change that later. 

Keith rushes into the bathroom for a quick shower (a soap and rinse). He brushes his teeth along the way of jumping into grayish jeans, rinses out his mouth right before slipping into a red hoodie. 

It wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but his brain never worked right in the morning. 

Keith smacked a black hat on backwards, ran downstairs with his phone hanging by a string in his pocket to run and grab his shoes. 

“You’re up early,” his mother says, glances at him only once from the abnormally bright computer screen.

“Yeah. The, uh, job? Thing?”

“You got a job? You should’ve told me!”

Keith looks up from his spot on the floor, only one sock and one shoe on. He tries not to let his face sour. 

His mother doesn’t seem to notice or even care, fingers busy rapping away, eyes everywhere but on him. 

It’s a norm, so it doesn’t bother him as much. She really only listens (or cares) when she wanted, so it’d be dumb to be all sensitive about it. 

He puts on his other shoe and goes straight for the kitchen. Since he usually slept through breakfast, and sometimes lunch (and rarely dinner), he tended to not be hungry that early in the day. 

He grabbed some protein bar and ate it on the way to the diner on his skateboard, chunky headphones placed over his ears. It was nasty though, combined with the taste of toothpaste so he ended up tossing it away in an outdoor trash bin. 

Keith drags the headphones down, lets it rest around his neck as he brings the skateboard to a stop. He checks his phone, pausing right in front of the small dessert diner. 

It was 8 in the morning. His eyes still felt irritated and puffy, even after practically scraping them with handfuls of water in the shower.

He almost felt asleep in there, too. He hadn’t planned on getting his hair wet, but leaning with both palms on the wall with the nozzle, his head bobbed forward and the drops gradually began to soak the blue, scraggly mess. Just after a quick minute of snoozing, he immediately rushed awake because it burned the fuck out of his scalp.

Keith set his phone away and ran up to the glass doors. The sign reads ‘closed’, yet the door wasn’t locked. He pulls himself inside, looking all around the place to make sure it wasn’t a damn burglar that had subtly broken in.

Amelia is the first person he sees. She wears a soft apron around her waist, a large, grey pan in her hands, the scent of cinnamon flowing everywhere. 

If he wasn’t hungry then, he surely was now.

“Whatcha got there?” Keith grins like a cat, setting his skateboard down behind the counter, curling around the poor woman and showing his nose off into the pan.

“It’s just bread,” she says amusedly. 

He smiles at her, but he deeply considers snatching one of slices. It seemed as if she read his mind, or face, rather, because it was really fuckin’ obvious with the way he was practically drooling.

“We can split one?”

“ _Alriiiight_!”

Amelia gestures to him the warm tray, to which he takes one of the pieces of bread. She sets the thing down on the counter so she could set them away into the glass display beneath the counter.

“Here,” Keith says, handing her the piece with more cinnamon.

She thanked him, and as they started to eat it (Keith wolfing his down), she steadily spoke, brushing her hair back, “I heard my parents talking about you.”

Keith struggles to not choke as he had the other day (with the milkshake). 

Amelia rolled her eyes, “It doesn’t matter, though. I’m eighteen. I could be with whoever I want.”

She grabbed a pair of tongs so that she could grab and put away every piece of bread. She isn’t aware of the blue-haired, blushing up a storm like some teen in middle school. 

Her words was indirectly telling him that she wanted to be with him.

So that was a score.

“What’d they say?”

“They think you’re some ‘city boy, wannabe street trash’ is all.” She shrugged. 

“Oh, really?” He grins, licking the cinnamon off of his thumb. That was kind of funny (the way her parents were already so disapproving).

Not to mention, he definitely looked the way they described him.

“They want me to get married to some rich asshole.”

“Ahaha, what’s his name?”

Amelia turned, a look of disgusted seriousness overplaying her naturally hooded features. “Phillip Lowell.”

Keith just dies. Amelia doesn’t laugh, for obvious reasons, just scoffs as she continues to stock up the display with snacks.

“I’m serious, Keith. It’s like it’s the 1700s, back when forced marriage was a thing. Still kinda is a thing,” she mutters the last bit, bitterly.

Keith bends down to collect his hat which had fallen off, sitting it back on his head. “You mean courting? Doesn’t sound _that_ bad. At least you’ll be double rich.” He cackles. 

“Oh, shut up.” Amelia playfully nudges him, takes the empty tray back into the backroom. Keith follows after her, laughing. “The aprons are hung up in that corner, there. I can get you your own set of keys.”

“For real? Sweet.”

Keith snatches one of the aprons, ties it around his waist.

The backroom has a decent kitchen, a metal sink and dishwater, some racks and a lot of other stuff even though the area wasn’t that large. It was especially comfy and quiet, though.

Amelia comes back from the kitchen with the tray again. This time, it isn’t cinnamon bread but steaming banana bread. “Set these into the display, oh, and also don’t forget to switch the sign.”

“Gotchu,” he says, grabbing the tray, eyes solely caught on the bread.

It sucked that they couldn’t have these for themselves now, but had to put it in the glass and let it seat, even if there was a warmer beneath. Keith sat the tray down to go and flip the sign so hat it read ‘open’ to the outside.

He knelt down, sliding the display glass open before snatching the tongs. Amelia returns to the front (he could tell by her heels), carrying several jars of milkshake and ice cream toppings. 

She aligned them along the machine stations. Keith sat back on his ass, biting onto a piece of banana bread as he watched her.

Today she wore a (you fucking guessed it, red!) sheath dress with no sleeves and some half slits on either side of her thighs. Of course, the white apron was around her hips, but it wasn’t particularly elongated, neither was his own.

Then there he was, in jeans and sneakers.

He could see why her parents didn’t like him.

Not only their outfits but also their characters contrasted greatly. Maybe that was why they were so good for one another.

“So which is it?” Keith spoke up, pausing in swallowing the rest of the banana bread.

“What?” She glances over her shoulder, confused.

“Lowell, or city boy-wannabe street trash?”

She huffed and he grins. 

* * *

Amelia’s parents luckily don’t end up dropping by and backing him into a corner. 

He tells himself that they can’t skip out on every lunch break to see if their daughter and some blue shit kid are fucking in the backroom, but then again, with these people you never knew.

The place was everything Amelia said it was; slow-paced, calming, quiet. 

She’d play some low rap on the radio as they worked, either swapping duties between the kitchen and upfront on register.

It worked out at the end of the day.

Though, it was around the evening when they were playfully joking around with one another when the door to the diner opened, catching both of their attention.

Two little kids, is what it looked liked, stepped inside and immediately walked up to the counter. 

“Uh, hi, what can I get for you two?” Keith asks, still grinning and faintly smiling from the whole showdown that finished a few mere seconds ago.

Amelia is muttering something about refilling the blueberry muffins. She goes to do so.

The first kid is albino, white skin and even whiter hair, clad in black and white stripes. The second kid is a ginger with dark eyes and clad in all black.

They looked to be about... eight, respectively?

That could’ve been either a stretch or right on the money, but it was difficult to tell with their heights.

Also, did they not have any parents?

“Can we get two cotton candies?” The albino asks him, a wild smile on his pale face.

Keith glances to the other kid to see if he was alright with the order, but then he sees the kid possesses the same, creepy ass smile. “Oh. ‘Course.”

The man set two glasses out, removed a hefty metal lid of where all the ice creams flavors sat, though separated.

He gives them an equal amount of the pink ice cream and then drops it off at the counter.

“$6.50.”

The orange kid gives him a five dollar bill and a shitload of coins. Just looking at it made his brain hurt.

Why did coins have to be a real thing? Counting was a real bitch.

“Thank you! Bye-bye!” They sing in sync. 

Keith looked away from the irritating mixture of discolored coins to see the kids fumbling out of the diner entirely with the glasses instead of sitting themselves at a table like normal people.

“What the hell?! Yo, Ams.” He sticks his head into the kitchen and says, “Some little fuckers just ran off with the glasses!” 

She curved her head around the wall to meet him. “Huh?”

“Two kids just took the damn glasses with them. Should I chase them, or?”

“Oh, those two. No, don’t bother.” She disappears for a moment, but when she does reappear, she has an amused smirk and a brand new tray of fresh blueberry muffins. “You’re supposed to give them the portable cups. They always do that.”

“How was I supposed to know?!” 

“Well, now you know,” she mocked, moving around him. “It’s happened like twice already, so don’t worry. I don’t think they do it on purpose, though.”

“What kinda dumbass does it three times on accident?” Keith adjusts his hat, in genuine thought.

They lean down to put the muffins away together. This close, Keith can smell her perfume.

He tries not to redden.

“Since we’re on the subject,” she began, handing him some tongs, “there’s a group of kids that comes in every once in awhile. You should be careful around them.”

“Are they tryna mug me or something?” 

“They might.” Keith’s eyes are wide. She waves a hand and laughs. “I don’t know, really. It’s rare that they come in, but when they do, there’s always a racket of some sort.”

Keith only listens, setting away the desserts.

Of course, since they lived on a street like this, you’d expect everyday to be a living hell in a sweet, tiny place like this. So hearing it really didn’t bother him all that much. 

“Do you know them?”

“No,” she says truthfully. “If I did, I would’ve said something. I’ve told my dad, and he’s intent on catching them, but...” 

She makes a sound through her teeth. That meant they were either too smart or too quick.

If they were _both_ , they were, and to put it simply, fucked.

“Just a bunch of asshole kids.”

“Do they mess with you?” Keith looks at her, pausing for the moment.

He says it like he could actually do something about it. He’s some inches shorter than her, yet the offer is still nice. 

Amelia meets the worried gaze with a uniquely collected one, though she continued to store the things away. “No. Just the customers. They really love attention.”

Keith wrinkled his nose.

He hated those types, the types that would do anything just for some eyes, even if it was a minute.

Of course, that was just one bad part of both high school and graduating (he’d still see these types even after leaving). 

Keith gets up after they locked the display glass, offers a hand to the girl who takes it immediately (he blushes plenty). 

She calls him _sweet_ and smiles at him. Keith thinks he might just die.

Crazy how the air changed all so sudden, and he was hardly ever able to keep up.

* * *

After closing down the shop, Keith washes his hands and hooks away his apron. They toss away all the unused food in the display, but save one last piece of bread so that they could split it amongst themselves.

It was cute, really. He loved every moment of it.

“I’ll escort you out this time,” Keith says (playfully) confidently. Amelia accepted the offer in the same manner, smiles dreamily at his side as they escape to the street after locking the place.

“I forgot to ask you the other day,” Keith spoke, slightly nervous.

“Hm?” Amelia hummed.

The wind through her hair is absolutely hypnotizing. 

“I, uh... I forgot to ask you for your number.”

She _giggles_ at him, offers out her phone and as he takes out his, and they exchange.

Keith immediately notices that her contact list is just her parents.

He creates a contact and added his number and name with a gross sunglasses emoji.

He gave her her phone back, and as he received his back, he saw that she had added a heart at the end. He almost swooned.

“I’ll see you in two days, Keith.” She shakes her palm at him, fucking wiggling her fingers. 

He knows his face is beet-red, but there isn’t much he could do about it. 

“Oh! I almost forgot,” she muttered, turning back around. She takes Keith’s left arm by his wrist, to which he pales at, and opens up his palm. “Here’s your key.”

Keith smiles open-mouthed at her, and then she dashed off as she always had.

You can bet the first thing he did when he got home was text her. 


	5. Flashing Lights

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> BF and GF get some new interesting customers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So obviously, people deal or cope with trauma in so many different ways, and I can’t speak/base it off how the average person might, because there isn’t an average, so I just base it off how I would react (which is very calm). Sorry if that makes them seem ooc

The string unhooked from the nail, sending the entire sign clambering out of his hands. 

Keith curses and picks it back up, sets it right back on the nail.

“You alright? That’s the third thing you’ve dropped this morning.”

“I’m good. Just tired.” 

It doesn’t help that he has a case of shaky hands, or that the radio is describing new, lawfully gruesome crimes (he nearly smashed the thing trying to shut it off).

“Well, come back here. I have something to show you.”

Keith perked up and obeyed, the faintest smirk forming on his face as if he already knew what was coming.

Maybe she knew how to cheer a guy up?

“The directions are hung on the wall above the workstation.”

“Hm?”

“I’ll help you learn how to make all the food from scratch.”

“That’s the surprise?”

“Were you expecting something else?” The girl asked, leaning against the counter, tilting her head.

“Uh,” he glances at her red lips, and then his shoes, “no.”

She knew what he’d been expecting. It was just more entertaining seeing him flounder. 

Keith had never been the baker type, on the other hand. He could barely cook himself an egg without burning it.

He scratches his neck, briskly contemplates his life, and then drops his arms. She starts to read off the transcript. 

Plain muffins. That was simple.

Muffins were basically bread cupcakes, so it really couldn’t be all that hard.

With Amelia’s help, the tray ended up in the oven after a good ten minutes, not including the preheating time for the oven. 

(If she hadn’t assisted him, he’d  likely be spending the next hour scooping out egg shells.)

Amelia had snuck in at a later time once she somewhat trusted him. She was lucky enough to catch him almost die after inhaling too much airy powder.

She doesn’t try to hold back the snicker.

He hears it instantly because he’d been quiet out of focus. “Shouldn’t you be at the register?”

“There aren’t any customers, so I wanted to come back and watch you.”

“Well, I did it,” he says, like he’s out of breath and had just finished some marathon. 

“Did what?”

“The muffins. It’s in the oven.”

Amelia hums and nods, giving him the impression that was impressed. She could’ve been, he wasn’t sure. 

Keith opened the oven door, showing off a muffin tray, the batter missing the cups entirely in some places. But they were in the oven, at least.

She shuts the door, holding back a laugh. 

“I’m not good at cooking, so don’t lie to me, but I fucking did it, alright?”

She tosses her hand. “I wasn’t gonna say anything.”

“Bullshit.”

She disguises her laugh into a cough, covering her mouth. Then she puts a hand to his face. “Oh.”

Keith tries to not flinch, but as a result he noticeably stiffens. “What?”

“You have some...” she swipes her thumb across his left cheek, “batter? How did you manage to do that?”

“Uh,” he reddens, “I don’t even know.”

Like some scene in a teen film, she licked it off of her thumb. Keith really feels like a ghost.

“It’s really good, Keith. Great job.”

Keith adjusts his hat as a response, red in the face. 

Her height impairs her from being able to directly stare him in the eye. Of course, she has to peer downwards, and it’s just embarrassing. 

“You might have some issues with the banana bread, or the bread in general. Come to me if you need help.”

Keith tugged on his headphones and chose a playlist, abashedly.

* * *

“Holy shit!” Keith screamed.

After serving a customer and some seconds of shuffling, Amelia stepped back into the kitchen, slight concern on her features. “Are you alright?”

Keith turned around with a tray of bread. “Dude, look at how good these shits turned out!”

Amelia stares at him, all traces of concern entirely gone. “They look great, Keith.”

Keith just grins apologetically. “Can I try one?”

“They’re yours, so,” she stretches out, walking back to the front.

“Hell yeah.” 

He follows after her with the tray, setting it onto the counter as she opened up the display.

“They’re a bit hot, so I’d wait a few minutes before putting them into the display.”

“Gotcha.” The boy reached out and grabbed a slice with his bare hand. It burned him, so he drops it right back onto the tray. “Shit!”

“I told you it was hot.”

“Yeah, but for the display,” he says, tone focused. He reaches out his other hand and grasps a piece by the crust. “Not for me.”

He bites it noisily.

“It’s good, though.” 

Keith wiped his hands on his jeans (completely forgetting that he had apron), as the girl began to set the bread away.

* * *

When he had finished getting ready this morning, hunching beneath the garage door that hardly ever budged, he saw that a good amount of police cars took up a chunk of his neighborhood, and a few streets past it.

He wasn’t able to see if there was any yellow tape from his angle, isn’t interested in sticking around long enough to find out. 

He takes a different route; goes behind the small neighborhood and over some streets, blasting music to distract himself from his beating heart. 

He was given a sign that that day wouldn’t go as well as the others had. He should’ve listened.

The sounds were earsplitting as they always had been. If it weren’t for his memories, he would’ve thought they were fireworks.

Amelia tells him that it’s normal in the area. If it truly was, he asks her why she chooses to stay, panic ridden in his eyes.

“Family,” is all she replies.

If she had the money, _just leave_ , is what he wanted to say, but that’s easier said than done with her situation, he knew.

She watches him expressionlessly;

“I’m gonna go to the bathroom real quick,” he says, and leaves to splash water into his face until all the fireworks dulled. 

The way he did things was to force himself to not think. If you managed that, you could carry on.

It wasn’t quite pretending, in a way, because he genuinely believed that he’d never seen anything. 

But he had, and like lightning, it was all rushing back to him.

When the sun began to mantle and they were met with silence, Amelia filled it by comforting him. “Feeling better?”

“I just skipped breakfast,” he snorted, dragging off the headphones around his neck because the thing was suffocating. 

“Don’t skip your breakfast, Keith,” she sarcastically scolded.

The door rings open. A few customers step in, the diner bathed in by the orange, setting sun.

Some heavy, dark fumes are steaming out behind a building. He doesn’t see anybody, but he does hear some familiar, though distant sirens.

The radio is back on, just as a distraction.

“Those the kids you were talking about?” He whispered.

“No, I don’t know who they are.”

“Oh.” 

Keith fixes his backward cap, stands alongside Amelia in front of the register. 

His heart stopped.

There were three of them, two of whom he was completely unfamiliar with, but there was that ginger from that one night. The one with the gun.

He didn’t seem to notice Keith, was too busy looking at his friends, listening to whatever it was that they were saying.

Amelia drags her palm across his shoulder in a comforting action, goes to leave to the kitchen. Keith wants to plead her, to not leave him with this guy, but he’s frozen in the moment, and she’s already gone.

The girl looked at him first.

Her hair was black and split into space buns. She wore a light pink, spaghetti crop top that showed off her bony shoulders and collarbones.

A black coat escaped down her shoulders. Every inch of her pale skin was marked with self-inflicted cuts.

A stick of a lollipop hung between her lips that were grinning. She takes it out to say with an accent, “Hey, you’re cute!”

“Uh... thanks. What can I get for you?” 

He tries to not let his voice falter, tries to not show an inch of fear that was streaming through his veins.

Whether they caught it or not, he wasn’t sure.

The one in the middle was dark skinned with a noticeable tattoo of a triangle beneath his right eye. 

He wore a flaxen-colored hoodie, embroidered with vulgar words and images. He smells like straight gasoline.

The last was that ginger, of course. 

The skin of his nose was motley of speckles, two rows of white teeth though he lacked some in a few spots.

He wore an olive-colored rain jacket unzipped about halfway, with a black top that covered his neck.

Keith was sure there was a gun on him, somewhere. 

He then feels much more intimidated by them alone than Amelia and her parents combined.

“Can I have a strawberry milkshake? Lactose-free?” She asks.

“Uh, sure, and you?” He turned. The two stopped chattering and looked his way.

“A coke float?”

Keith nods and looks to the ginger. “How ‘bout you?”

“Chocolate.”

Keith turned to make their orders.

The guy wasn’t giving him any kind of unusual stare, one that would surely put the teen off guard (make him remember the night he hated).

He just sits there, and somehow, that makes Keith even more uneasy. 

Keith nearly drops the glass cup when the girl shouted, “Can I get a strawberry muffin with that!”

“‘Course,” he grumbled. He turns back around, opens the display and retrieves her stupid muffin. “Here.” 

She grins at him wide and proud, taking the snack.  


When he escapes to the kitchen to grab a fresh coke, Amelia looks at him all weird. “You good?”

“I gotta tell you something later,” he mutters. He’d tell her everything that happened, and just hopefully, it wouldn’t scare her off. “Help me make these drinks?”

“Of course.” She takes the soda can from his slightly quivering fingers and joins him up front.

She makes two of the drinks, lets him make the last which happened to be the plain chocolate. As much as he didn’t like it, he preferred having to serve it himself over her being in front of the jackass.

Not only that, though, Amelia was way better with customer communication. 

He goes to give the ginger his chocolate milkshake. “Here ya’ go,” he says. 

The ginger looks at the drink for a moment before glancing up to look at Keith. Keith smiles at him just to be the regular friendly employee. Blue eyes explore his body, and then he’s giving Keith that especially toothy smile.

Keith doesn’t want to be here.

“Your total is $15.22,” Amelia tells them cooly, not at all phased by the overbearing stench of weed. Maybe that was also a usual.

The three young adults stared at one another for a good second, and then they’re all suddenly whipping out their fists. Keith’s flinch is a harsh blink.

It’s just a game of Rock Paper Scissors.

The ginger curses, the only one to have picked _scissors_ with the other two picking _rock_. He reaches a hand down into a pocket, cursing again at his friends who started to make fun of him, and pulls out two crumpled tens. 

He gives it straight to Keith, who completely didn’t expect it.

Keith shuffled to the register, inserted the two bills and snatched out a five and some coins. Instead of giving the money right back into the ginger’s hand, he smacks it onto the counter. “Your change.”

The ginger doesn’t even blink.

The police sirens are still echoing around the city. It could’ve been just a coincidence, but that was a fat chance, itself.

“So, what was it that you wanted to tell me?” Amelia asked him as they slowly made their way back towards the kitchen.

Keith just shakes his head. “It’s nothing.”

It’d be useless to even try. She was used to this type of thing, after all. It wouldn’t surprise her, nothing would get done about it. The best thing he _could_ do was hope that they never returned.

Amelia sends him to refill the display, though not by much as the day was ending, as she began to clean up the kitchen (all that powder he had spilled earlier, still smeared on his apron).

Keith takes a tray of muffins in variety, setting it onto the counter. He ignores the laughter above him at the counter, tries to block them out completely.

“Please?” The girl pleaded.

“No,” the ginger says stiffly.

“ _Please_!” 

The guy in the yellow is cackling at them both. Keith glances up to see the girl leaning over his lap, as the guy was stuck in the middle, to reach over to the ginger and stuff a piece of the muffin into his mouth. Or rather, his face, because he doesn’t open his lips.

“It’s good! You’ll like it, Pico!”

“Yeah, it’s actually really good, bro.”

“Open your damn mouth!”

“It tastes like shit!” The ginger snaps at her. 

She snorts, unaffected. “I don’t know what’s wrong with your tastebuds. Strawberry is the best.”

“The fuck it isn’t.”

“The fuck it is,” the other guy with the tattoo laughs.

She goes to shove the rest of the muffin in her mouth, but the guy snags a chunk. “Hey!”

“Damn, D. You really did a number on those fuckers. I’ve still got powder all over me.” The ginger is wiping himself off, particles Keith couldn’t see or smell.

He slows his process of loading the muffin basket immensely to listen.

“Shit. I know, right?” The guy grinned. 

“Too bad the fucker lived.”

“I could’ve got him if you would’ve let me!” The girl exclaimed. 

“The place was on _fire_ , Nens,” the guy in yellow says, like they’re discussing an earth issue. “You would’ve burnt to a crisp the second you put a foot in there!”

She huffs heavily. “I should’ve went and took you with me.”

“Hey, if you take me, I’m takin’ Pico.”

“The fuck you are, bitch. If you two die, leave me out of it.”

“Aww, Pico, you’ll do us like that?” The girl wearing space buns frowned.

“Hell yeah I would.”

“Damn dude,” the other guy laughed, nudging him in the shoulder. They all pause their chatter to slurp on their drinks.

Keith hears a little chiming sound, and then feels a vibration run up his leg. He holds the tongs still in one hand, uses the other to retrieve his phone.

A text message from his mother, something about being late for dinner. And eating leftovers?

Aw, gross.

He grimaced, shoves his phone back into his pocket. He finishes up putting the muffins away, and as he puts away the tongs and goes to stand, he sees the ginger peering over the counter, staring down at him. The other two don’t notice, too indulged in their little scuffle. Keith feels the skin of his face blemish purple, like the air’s been strangled out of him.

He doesn’t try to say anything to him. Doesn’t know how, doesn’t even want to. He stands a bit too quickly, banging his head on the edge of the counter. He curses, clapping a palm to his hat where the skin burned beneath.

The ginger’s eyes rise along with the blue-haired guy. Both of his elbows are thrown casually across the counter, chest pressed forward. 

Keith picks up the tray and considers striking him with it.

“You good?” The ginger asks. Keith looks around to see if the man had been talking to either one of his friends. No. He was talking to Keith, looking right at him, too, the faintest smirk on his white skin like the whole thing was funny. 

“M’ fine,” he says, goes to turn around and never come back, but then Amelia arrives.

Clearly, she doesn’t understand auras.

“Hey, can I get a refill?” Asks the guy in the yellow hoodie. 

“Oh! Me too!” 

Amelia smiles lazily at them (she doesn’t understand their wicked ass energies, it’s just her character), and nods. She leaves for the fridge.

“That your girlfriend?” The ginger says to him, in that same stable tone.

That definitely brings him back to that night with Daisy. Keith has never wanted to kill someone before, yet his face burns.

“Aw, look! He’s all pink!” The girl grinned.

The group laughs at him.

“She’s not my girlfriend. We’re just friends,” Keith says, ramming his hands into his pockets, beneath the guy’s naturally intent gaze. He doesn’t have it in him to look up.

“Just friends?” The ginger grinned wickedly.

“She’s hot as shit,” the other says.

“I call dibs!” The girl yelled.

Amelia returns with a coke. As she snaps it open, the ginger spoke up, “To go, please.”

“Alright,” Amelia smiles. She finishes and serves their drinks rather quickly ( _thank, God_ , Keith thinks. Maybe she was also tired of them).

The guy in the hoodie smacks down a ten dollar bill. They get off the stools and move towards the door, laughing and nudging one another. Keith stands and watches them go. The dimly lit shows a metallic glint in the ginger’s pocket as he snatches the coke float from his friend, who cusses him out. 

Imagine if Keith had done something he shouldn’t have.

He rubs his face and sighs.

“Were they bad?”

“Huh?” Keith looks to see Amelia staring at him, eyes hooded.

“Sorry; were they _that_ bad?”

Keith shrugged his shoulders, shook his head. Didn’t matter, but what did was going home, that was until he remembered that his mother wouldn’t be home to cook.

And he’d rather die than eat leftover spaghetti.

“Hey, I can stay a bit later.”

“Really? That’s awesome.”

He drags his shoe into the floor awkwardly. “How about a date this weekend?”

Amelia smiles at him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you happen to read this, lmk if you prefer a long chapter with multiple events, or have it split into several chapters that aren’t as long. I’m kind of stuck between choosing


	6. After Midnight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Parts slowly start to piece in together. Keith thinks he might’ve really fucked up this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: contains some slurs and gore/violence.
> 
> I rewrote this chapter at least 4 different times, not sure why.  
> Also it might not make sense now but it will soon. One more thing, “Heaven Street” is based on that game Rhythm Heaven, and Saul is a song (Saul Good, like it’s all good? Except it’s not? Haha funny) Just thought that was cool.

“You’re a dumbass,” is what Amelia immediately says. Her red fingernails rest against her chin as they split an ice cream bowl in some distant sweets shop. “But I wouldn’t put it past you.”

Keith isn’t very good with exteriors.

“It doesn’t change anything, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

He grips the arm of the spoon, tries not to sadly snicker. “Sorry you had to find out this way. And sorry about—”

She waved him off. “I’ve done it before. Not a big deal.”

His eyes rock out of his face, torso stabbed onto the table’s edge. He groans from the pain, but he’s still wheeling in excitement.

Then she tells him that she finds it cool.

He drops the spoon he’d been holding still for a good minute.

“Spray painting and all; it gives the streets some color, some cool art to look at.”

(Instead of all that _tape_.)

He should’ve trusted her the second he discovered her composed character.

Maybe he should lay in the shallows for a bit. His thoughts run back a mile, and then a grin slowly forms. “So how’d you do it?”

She mirrors it precisely. “Slashed his tire with the knife he gave me.”

“Sick.”

* * *

One thing to know about the earth is that it doesn’t wait for you.

Any basic understanding of geology can tell you that, in more than enough detail, but on another note.

You also find that silence would always be a better friend than expressive relief.

The news channel is a constant thing in the apartment, aside from both children and adult cartoons, no in between.

The reporter describes every approximate time, and what crime may be connected to what. That was, until the thing abruptly shut off.

It’d been the only sound in the room for hours.

“What the...” Pico blinked at the black screen for a moment. He grabs the remote and switches it on a couple of times, to no avail. 

“What happened?” Darnell asks at his side. His head was slung back across the cushions, the taste of weed heavy in the air.   


“That’s what I’m trying to figure out, dumbass,” the ginger snaps, getting up off the couch. Nene, who’d been asleep on his shoulder, falls against the couch.

She doesn’t wake up as she was the heaviest fucking sleeper on the planet. Several planets.

Pico presses the on button directly on the TV, hoping that that would do the case. He checks to see if the wire got accidentally unplugged.

It was still plugged.

“What a piece of shit.” 

The man kicks it.

“How ‘bout we buy a new one instead of beating it up more?” Darnell says from the couch, blowing smoke upright.

“With what money, dipshit?”

“I don’t know, dipshit. Maybe the money we took from that sleaze-bag back at the greenhouse.”

“Oh, yeah.”  


Darnell rolls his eyes and takes another mouthful. Pico grabs his keys and shrugs on his coat, the air’s a little stuffy. “I’ll be back.”

“You’re getting the TV now?”

“It’s 9 in the fucking afternoon, D.” Pico stuffs a cigarette in his mouth, gritting his teeth to hold it. “Nothing’s open right now.”

“Oh. Ahaha.” The man scratches his temple in thought. 

His brain was very fried when he smoked, to the point where he said the most dumbest, infuriating things. 

The ginger steps out, goes down the few flights of stairs leading to their single apartment.

As soon as the cold night air hits him, he lights the thing and escapes to the streets. 

Darnell had slightly fucked up on exploding the building on Saul Street. He was only able to set the place on fire with the short time he was given, which still managed to burn a body or three.

The whole show wasn’t done out of spite. In fact, they merely called it ‘sweet revenge’ for all the unnecessary shit some of the workers had done to the trio.

They rushed into some dessert shop to treat themselves, which was where they met those two kids.

Some days later, Nene dragged him out to a bar to drink with him, and it all went fine up until a perverted bastard chose to sit next to her, overly touchy.

Nene slyly hugged the stranger and stabbed him right in the dick right before Pico was able to take his gun out.

She finishes her fruity shot, grabs Pico’s hand, and drags him back out giggling as quick as they had gone in. 

Now they spend their current days hugged up in a tiny apartment because of all the vandalism that been down around their area.

Because of it, a major rise in cops spread out over the streets like cockroaches.

Strange that they cared more about that than a building getting set on fire or some guy getting his balls cut off in a public bar.

It was funny, really, but just as equally irritating.

The moon shines above him eerily.

Some guys steps out behind the wall like they’d been waiting the entire time.

“You the boyfriend of that Asian bitch who castrated our boy?” The guy in the front asks him lowly. The guys behind him were just as equally buff.

Pico is able to take exactly two hits before he’s met with the odd face of danger.

“Maybe you should show your shitweasels how to keep their dicks in their pants.” He steps on the cigarette to put it out. “Maybe they’ll learn next time.”

The guy steps up and grabs him right by the collar of his jacket. Pico already has his hand on his gun, though hidden.

“I should knock the rest of your fuckin’ teeth out, motherfucker.”

Pico puts his free hand up as if he’s surrendering. “Woah. How ‘bout you give the guy my condolences instead? I didn’t know she’d do that.”

The guy holds him closer. He can smell the guy’s rancid breath. “Is that true?”

“Sure,” Pico shrugs. 

They have some awkward staring competition for a few hot seconds, Pico genuinely unfazed by it as this was, unfortunately, becoming a norm.

The guy releases him, and as Pico lands back on his feet, another guy steps him and cracks him one across the mouth.

_Why does everyone always go for my fuckin’ mouth?_ Pico bitterly thinks to himself, stumbling back a bit. His tongue feels heavy with the weight of blood.

_Because it’s a fucking hotspot for knuckles_. 

But these guys chose to wear brass.

Didn’t matter to him.

Pico recoiled and shot the guy right in the head. Without any hesitation, he goes over and shoots the second, the third, and runs to chase down the fourth.

“Maybe you should’ve thought about not bringing brass to a fight. That’s a little unfair, Johnny,” Pico coos at him once the guy’s rightfully settled under his foot.

He spits out some blood and another tooth, gums aching. “Now I might fucking need braces.”

Pico gives him no room to speak, shoots him twice right after that, once in the dick and another in the center of his skull. 

If you asked him where he was the night these bastards died, he’d answer _enjoying the fireworks_.

He lights another cigarette and rams it between his teeth, ignoring the outpour of blood. 

Pico frowns, but then smiles.

Two familiar figures stroll by him on sidewalk across the street. Their arms are locked. 

They were out here having a dinner date while he just got his one of his lower front teeth knocked out. Maybe there was a chance it’d grow back.

Damn. And he’d really been looking for a chill night out, too. 

* * *

  
  


When you weren’t too busy with the bouldering weight of reality, you were stuck on the false image of it.

(The idea that nothing would be able to catch up to him with the pace he was currently going in life.)

The feeling is like being thrown into an ocean during winter. Everything washes over you, but it isn’t nostalgia dawning down. (It’s a mockery.)

Keith had been the one to send his exclusive affections at first.

He stuck his head into the driver’s window and grinned. “Be careful.”

“Get your head out of the window, Keith,” his mother sighs, and then she gives him a one second interception before she runs over his feet.

The boy jumped back just before the car jerked out of the parking spot. He shoots her a cocky thumbs up all the way until she’s out of view.

It’s his way way of disguising world news as a concern about the weather (and if you asked him, he did it smoothly).

The kicker of bordering his twenties is the lack of consideration.

It’s a good thing being able to live freely and not think about the repercussions that would follow.

Eventually, they would.

He spent the day with nothing but his brain and a pocketed spray can.

(The thing was basically a coping mechanism, as stupid as it sounded.)

He gets a sheer taste when someone catches him defacing the sides of a business building. He turns around, his hat and hood already over his head only because it was a habitual thing and he never got caught.

He nearly pisses himself when he sees that that deep voice doesn’t belong to a cop but to Amelia’s bull of a father.

First thing Keith does is scoop up his skateboard and run. 

It’s the scariest shit on his behalf, but if he’d been a bystander, he’d be laughing his ass off.

An abrupt left is all it takes for him to fuck his life over. He’s dangling from a partially dismantled fire escape railing of the three fuckers he saw a few nights ago.

His half-empty spray can rolled out of his pocket, falling right at the guy’s feet. He secretly kind of wished the thing fell on his head.

The man effortlessly reached out and snatched him by an ankle.

His grip around the pole of the ladder doesn’t immediately relent. He plunges a foot, scraping his chin against the hand railing.

“Hey! Give me your skateboard.”

“What?” He muttered, still fighting with the arm around his leg. Why the hell would he give them (of all people) his skateboard, even though he knew he was about to die to this bastard?

Keith gives the damned thing to the pair last second. He expects them to take it, shut the window, and  then that’d be the end, but the guy bend right over Keith, his shadow just  looming.

He tosses the thing right over the guy’s head.

“Headshot!”

“Fuck yeah!”

Keith isn’t sure which one is laughing, or if they both are. His eyes are caught on the man who looked just about dead.

“Grab my hand,” the guy says. Keith looks up in a squint.

“I’m good,” he responded coldly. He peers down to see exactly how high he was so that maybe he could jump off and go home. If not, then he’d just happily die.

“Aw, don’t be like that!” The guy grabs him instead, tugging his two wrists.

The yank is unexpectedly strong, his legs unclamping around the fencing in the railing. Keith lets out a scream because of the temporary loss in balance.

“Step onto the floor, dude. I won’t drop you,” the guy tells him on a laugh. 

Keith listens only because of that flash of fear. He toppled over the fencing that guarded the window.

It was kinda like a balcony, but you had to climb out of the window and there was only about a foot and a half of space, not to mention it was unstable as hell.

You had to be a crazy fuck to even  want to stand out there.

Once the two help him through the window and Keith hits the carpeted ground, both relief and exhaustion washes over him.

The guy stands back, smiling down at him like he’s just donated to a charity. The girl stays hunched over the window, still shooting remarks about the guy.

“Why’d you help me?” Keith asks him, a genuine question.

“That’s the motherfucker that’s been on our asses for, like, a week now. And you looked like you needed help.” 

Then he beams at him. “I’m Darnell. This is Nene.”

The girl smiles at him widely, enough to make her eyes squint.


	7. Delay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A look into BF & GF’s date night.  
> A few days after, BF finds his situation getting way worse.

“Are you nervous?”

They’re walking together on a cold Saturday night when Amelia smoothly coasts her arm around Keith’s. A warmth is pressed to his side.

He flushes and nearly reels. “No.” 

Due to everything that’s been happening lately, the pair decided to have a change of plans to hang at the swings and watch the stars, if there were any.

Keith wouldn’t complain either way, though. As long as he was with her, he was alright.

“You aren’t cold?” Keith asks the woman as they sit themselves on the swings of some children’s park.

Amelia’s wearing another red dress, though this one fell a bit above her knees, and the sleeves were quite thin.

She smiles assuringly at him.

Still, Keith strips off the jacket that’s layered over his hoodie, tries not to look her in the eyes as he’s deeply flustered and that’d definitely shake off the vibes he didn’t want her to see.

Not in that moment. 

“Thank you, Keith,” she says as she puts the jacket on. 

The guy keeps his eyes aimed straight.

Not to ruin the mood or anything, but the guy’s never been on a date before.

He doesn’t know what’s considered appropriate and what’s not, so sitting in silence, skin a euphoric pink, seemed to fall along the fence of being decent. 

Keith glances over out of his thoughts, just to briefly catch a glimpse of Amelia.

She looks up at the black sky.

Keith shoved his hands into his jean pockets and follows suit.

“I used to watch the stars with my old boyfriend.”

He frowns upon hearing that. 

“It was great. Until my mom caught us kissing.”

Amelia sighs lightly. Her breath is visible with how biting the weather was.

Keith shouldn’t be surprised that Amelia’s had boyfriends before, though, or kissed them. Or looked at the stars and _then_ kissed them.

Yet he feels that this might end up different, in a way he wasn’t sure how to describe just yet.

Keith catches himself repeatedly looking away from the crescent moon to watch Amelia. 

“How’d that go?”

“She beat him up,” she replies simply.

Keith starts to laugh, but when he sees Amelia is deadpanned, he slowly stops.

“Oh, you were serious?”

She leans her head against the chains holding up the swing. 

“Did she use her high heels as a weapon?”

She chuckles humorously. 

“Is the guy okay?”

She’s not responding to any of his questions, and it’s making him nervous. 

“She didn’t kill him, Keith, if that’s what you’re thinking,” is what she finally lets out. Keith exhales. 

“Will she kill me?” 

Amelia melts back down into silence for a moment, but that was nothing compared to the lazy smile stretching across her face. “Probably.” 

He suddenly feels like every organ was ripped out through his throat. She sees the fear and giggles.

“I’m just kidding. Chill out.” She nudged his arm. They both knew she wasn’t.

The spend about another half hour watching fog pass the moon, pointing out strange shapes.

Keith hadn’t any time to rid of the paint can in his pocket, so he slyly gets turns his head. “Can I show you somethin’?”

She looks at him with relaxed surprise. “Sure.”

Keith excitedly leads her beneath the heap of playground constructions, to the particular, wide slide everyone loved to vandalize, whether that be with actual paint or a fucking pencil.

He takes out the can and sprays a hasty outline of a woman smoking. He looks over and grins.

Amelia has her hands into the pockets of Keith’s jacket. He tries not to lose his composure when she checks the dripping mess. “Do you do this often? You’re pretty good.”

“Not really,” he technically lies. “I just practice in my garage. I heard somethin’ about it being similar to tattoo art, so that’s what got me.”

“I’ve always wanted a tattoo.” She nudges him again. “You should design one for me one day.”

“Really?”

“Yup. I’d be your first.”

Keith knew that she meant light by that, but it sounded implicative.

She shocks him by stepping forward and taking the can from his hands.

The words she sprays surrounded by flowers has him shaky. Not to mention, she has good handwriting.

“Do you draw?” He asks as she handed back the paint can, turning back for the swings. “You’re pretty damn good.”

“Only when I’m bored.”

Keith stuffs it into his pocket and dashes after her. “Is that all you do in your free time?”

“Pretty much.”

It isn’t all that different from what Keith does. After all, he doesn’t do much, either. 

They go to chat about a number of things.

Keith finds out that they share an equal amount of interests, and they simultaneously ignore the messages they receive from their parents to fall in deeper in the conversation.

That was until her mother calls her.

“Hi, mom,” she says in that lazy cheerful way. Keith is ducked like the woman could actually see him.

He listens to her bicker, mutes all the laughs flying out of his mouth at all the lies she tosses in. 

“I’ve gotta go,” she says, getting off of the swing. 

“Me too. I’ll walk you there.” Keith pauses. If her parents actually liked him, then he wouldn’t hesitate. “Uh, to your street.”

She laughs. Keith rubs his neck with one hand, pockets the other shyly. It’s like their in fucking middle school.

She steps forward carefully on her heels (the playground was made of dirt and chips, Keith almost tripped about twice jumping off of both the slide and the swing).

She leans down and kisses him right on the cheek. “I had a great time, Keith.”

Keith grabs his cheek like he’s been punched. After a minute, he says a tiny, “... me too.”

“How about we do this again sometime?”

He resorts to nodding for the rest of the night. 

* * *

A long-legged figure steps into view, dressed in a simple tee and sweats. 

The girl in shorts shuts the window with a loud creak. Judging by the slight struggle she put up, it must’ve been old.

“ _Hey_ , aren’t you that guy from that ice cream spot?” She asks, pointing right at him like he wasn’t seated on the ground in front of her.

“No,” Keith flat-out lies.

“Yeah, with the blue hair and the hot ass coworker?” The guy, Darnell, gestures.

“Girlfriend,” he corrects. “And it’s _Keith_.”

“You two went out on a date?!” Nene shouts unreasonably loud.

Keith grimaces but nods. He’s not quite used to her pitch, but Darnell doesn’t seemed fazed, so maybe that’s just her.

“That’s _so cute_! She’s like twice your size!” 

He wants to interrupt, already deeply frowning, especially when the other guy fucking _snorts_. 

Keith helps himself up because he decides he isn’t touching either of their hands. He’s intent on leaving the apartment and grabbing his skateboard.

“Hey, you’re much smaller than I thought you’d be,” the girl adds on, scrubbing her chin like there’s stuff to think about. 

“Thanks,” he replies simply, sharply. He goes directly for the door. 

Darnell stops him. “Oh, you don’t wanna do that.” Keith raises his brows. “They’re probably still looking for you.”

“Who’s _they_?”

“The police.” 

He didn’t have time for this bullshit. 

As much as Keith’s concerned, only one person had been chasing him, not the entire workforce. He moved past the guy, who doesn’t really stop him this time.

The door swings open, but Keith wasn’t the one to open it.

A guy in a familiar green jacket steps in, several steaming bags in his hand. “I brought Chinese!”

Nene cheers louder than a crowd of a million. Darnell starts to grin. Keith groans from the floor.

The guy looks down. “Who’s this?”

“That’s Keith.”

Keith glances up, blood running down his nose. A ginger is staring right back down at him. Keith wishes the force of the door had killed him.

“Did you get egg rolls?!” Nene asks excitedly, practically hounding the guy still in the doorway.

Through all that, though, the ginger keeps stable eye contact with Keith, who then scoffed and picked himself up, wiping his nose with the back of his sleeve.

“Keith, this is Pico,” Darnell informed, mouth full of egg roll which Nene had given him since they both liked that the best. 

Pico. What the fuck kind of name was that?

“How’d he get here?” Is all that Pico asks, not once tearing his gaze away from the teen. For some reason, suspicion laced his tone like _he_ was the one in deep shit.

“He outran that bastard that wouldn’t leave us alone. You should’ve seen him,” Darnell grins wildly, madly. “He was fast as shit! They both were!”

“You two helped him?”

“Through the window, yeah.”

Pico turns to Keith, who looks up at him, face clearly wrinkled in displeasure.

He starts to grin. Keith feels his blood chill.

“What were you runnin’ from, Keith?” He asks him, tone lower and much different.

Keith feels his blood chill. “I wasn’t running from shit.”

“You must’ve done _something_ if a guy like that was chasing you down,” Pico counters.

The guy was like a big ass cat, for obvious reasons. Like the way he moved. It creeped him out.

Keith genuinely doesn’t know how to respond. His mouth felt dry of any words. 

This could go two ways. He could tell the guy to fuck himself and then go home even though that Darnell was probably right about the police lingering around like a pack of sharks.

Or he could tell them what he did without practically asking for a bullet in his throat.

Keith chooses to not react at all.

“You should stay,” Darnell tells Keith, seated on the floor aside Nene at the table in front of the TV. He points to him with his chopsticks. “That shit looks nasty.”

Keith’s fingers come up to his nose upon instinct. 

He thinks he’s a great deal of stupid for sitting himself down on the couch, right in front of Darnell. Pico sets all the bags onto the table and then leaves the room for a quick moment.

He comes back out without his jacket, sits himself right besides Keith, who goes as still as a statue. Nene suddenly whips around. Keith would be lying if he said that didn’t scare him.

She starts to wipe his nose with some tissue.

“Be gentle with him, Nens,” Darnell chokes on a laugh. “You’ll break it more.”

“Shut up! It’s not even broken! It’s just bleeding.”

Darnell cackles at her.

Nene holds the teen’s jaw with her other hand for a better grip. Pico is leaning into his personal space with interest as well as Darnell was, stuffing his face with rice.

“Put some inside,” Pico insisted. “It might bleed again.”

Nene does so, a little too deep. Keith sneezes from the dust of the material climbing a bit too high.

The two guys laugh at Nene (or Keith), and then watch as she put more tissue into his nose, though not as deep to not repeat what had just happened.

When he’s finished, Nene lays back between Pico’s legs. The three watch the news reporter talk about some members of a gang found shot dead in an alleyway.

Keith can’t help but feel like he’s about to be murdered.

* * *

“Uh, we kinda got a problem.”

All but Nene, who’s the one at the window (had been opening it for some fresh air), looked towards the direction.

She stands aside. “He’s gone.”

“Who?” questions Pico, the second last to pull himself off of the couch.

“Oh, shit, she’s right. The guy that was chasin’ Keith earlier?”

The street is empty of any unconscious person. It scares the living hell out of Keith.

“I coulda sworn we killed him.”

“Well you obviously didn’t fuckin’ kill him if he isn’t there,” Pico snorts at him.

“We hit him in the head with a damn skateboard, Pico!”

“You should’ve shot him to be sure.”

“I knew you were gonna say that.”

The four stare out the window for a few more minutes until the ginger pulls away, turns to Keith. “Bastard might’ve took your skateboard with him for fingerprints.”

Keith’s heart drops to his shoes.

Pico gives an indecipherable grin. “Looks like you’re stuck here for a bit.”


	8. Courts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some things are said and some people are met.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My shit is wonky so if I accidentally made a typo LMK or if I accidentally posted an unfinished chapter, pretend like you didn’t see it. thanks <3

“You know he made me clean the painting, right?”

They escape the shop together, like the cute couple they were.

Keith doesn’t even try to hide his laugh. “What the fuck?”

The guy probably did it because he suspected the two were dating regardless of the family’s nonsensical guidelines about trashy boyfriends, and that was her punishment for it.

Of course he wouldn’t just leave it there for the professionals to pick up.

The outside cold hits them like a train. 

Why he decided to make their apology date at some ice cream store in late autumn, he’d never know. 

Keith stuffs his hands into his pockets in hopes to lessen the effect of the breeze.

A wicked grin stretches all over his face. “Is he bed-bound?”

“Keith, stop it.”

“No, I’m for real. Is he wearing bandages? Did he pass out?”

He was sure Luis took the hit like a champ with no pills, but just the thought of a guy like that passing out from a skateboard-related injury was funny as shit, to Keith at least.

Amelia didn’t seem to be as bothered as he’d thought she’d be. Perhaps it’s because she likes Keith, and isn’t with the overprotective family thing.

Keith doesn’t seem to understand why the guy hasn’t called the police this far in, however. He hasn’t even reported the vandalism, or the injury.

It weirds him out, to an extent.

He hasn’t even told Amelia that he hadn’t been the one to hit her dad with the skateboard. In fact, he hadn’t even mentioned that group of kids, only because he didn’t want to rope her into their bullshit.

Not because he was protecting them. That’s the last thing he’d ever do.

Speaking of which, two nights ago when he’d been stuck at their cluttered apartment, the three offered to take him home, but they never mentioned anything about a _car_.

Keith obviously declined. He already didn’t trust the bastards, much less, he’d go and show them where he lived.

He took himself home, even though he almost got hypothermia along the way.

“We can’t work at the diner together for a bit,” Amelia tells them as she wraps her arm around his, which is still pocketed.

It’s a habit, the hands-in-the-pocket thing.

Keith looks over at her, ignoring the chill biting his face at the sudden twist. “Don’t tell me he’s waiting there for me.”

Amelia stays quiet, slackly smiling.

“ _And_ he kept my skateboard, man.”

Amelia laughs at him. “I saw it in his room.”

“What a fucking _asshole_ , dude.”

As Keith goes to adjust his hat, clearly annoyed by what the guy’s done, a loud clutter of noise and a physical weight over his shoulder jumps him out of it.

He peers over. Amelia suddenly looks rather hesitant to keep holding his arm, although she continues to do so. He sees an arm tossed over the same shoulder, so quickly turns to his left to see who the fuck it was.

A certain redhead had slung his arm around his shoulder. 

Keith gets a strong whiff of plain cigarettes and an unfamiliar drug.

To Amelia’s right, Nene hooked her arm around hers and slightly tugs her aside so that the couple were no longer touching. Darnell has some weird beanie on, his hood tossed over as he smiles open-mouthed at his girlfriend.

The two began (distracting) speaking to her like they’re a group of close college friends.

Pico leant down into his personal space, starts to simper at him and says lowly, “You know you’re not supposed to be out on the streets like this, right, Keith?”

The blue-haired teen is hardly frightened.

Pico has his green hood over his head and some sand-colored cargo joggers. His nose is dusted pink and his blue eyes are a tad hazy, but Keith knew it wasn’t the cold that had done that to him.

“I’d hate to separate you and your girlfriend, but you _do_ know the only reason why the bastard didn’t call the cops was because he wanted to handle it himself?”

Keith’s eyes go wide a bit. It wasn’t necessarily fresh news to him. Luis sounded the type to go out and do that, even if he was a busy ass businessman.

It might’ve been the fact that he got to hear it from Pico, himself.

“Get the fuck offa me,” Keith snaps, jerking himself out of the guy’s arm. The two were some feet away from the trio. Keith knew that was intentional.

Pico retreats his hands to himself, watches the worried little boyfriend glance over to his girlfriend. It was cute.

“I wasn’t the one that hit him with a fucking skateboard.” 

The starter letter of Pico’s name burned on Keith’s tongue, so he refused to say it, for a multitude of reasons, ever since the beginning.

“This isn’t about the skateboard,” Pico says simply, in that gravelly voice of his that makes Keith want to smash it.

“Then what was all that shit about it? And the fingerprints?”

“He already knows who we are. He didn’t need the fingerprints. He just took it to _spite_ you.”

So the shit about the fingerprints was a tactic to scare him into listening?

The younger watches the ginger slither back over to him, drawls out in a near whisper, “I know you vandalized his building, Keith. That’s some tough shit.”

Keith clenched his fists, agitated.

“But it isn’t exactly smart fuckin’ around with his _daughter_. You’re aware of that, aren’t you?”

“Of course I fucking know.”

“Then drop her.” 

“Or what?” Pico only blinks at him. “Don’t rope her into this bullshit. She has nothing to do with it. Just because your friends dragged me into this, it doesn’t mean I’m automatically apart of your group’s shit.”

But he’s already dragged _himself_ into it by vandalizing the guy’s workplace. He doesn’t mention that fact, though.

The parents never liked him from the start, he just _hated_ the idea of Pico and his friends making a bigger deal out of what it really was.

The ginger shows no slight sign of emotion, it’s like trying to tell an emotion of a fucking wall.

“You know she’ll turn on you eventually,” Pico actually shrugs. “And I wasn’t going to tell you this, but...”

The ginger practically lays his lips against the shell of Keith’s ears. “Your girl’s daddy sent me to kill you.”

Every drop of Keith’s blood feels as if it’s been sucked right out of his body, leaving him an empty shell. The weather was doing jackshit to him, now.

“Have I tried to kill you yet, Keith?”

Pico hasn’t, and Keith knows that. They both do. They _also_ know that Keith’s seen the way he kills.

Mercilessly. No hesitance. Without guilt.

“Give me your phone,” Pico says, no longer a whisper.

Keith shakily hands it over to him, doesn’t really know what to say or what to do anymore ever since the guy uttered those words out.

He never expected Luis to do some fucked up shit like that. Better yet, he didn’t think Pico had any reason to _spare_ him.

“What do you need it for?” Keith asks him, all braveness and anger completely dissipated.

“You have my number now. You also know where to find me.”

Pico doesn’t hand the phone back but slides it into the back pocket of Keith’s jeans instead, leaning over his chest.

Smirking toothily, he steps away.

Darnell and Nene come hopping over to him like they planned the entire thing out, perfect timing and everything.

Amelia approaches Keith’s side and stays there.

She doesn’t appear frightened, but is, in fact, smiling in that lazy, carefree fashion. What the fuck did those three talk about?

“We’re having pizza tonight!” Nene leaps, spreading her arms out like an excited kid. “You two should join us!”

His eyes uncontrollably glide over to Pico. He’s smiling along with his friends, but directing it towards Keith specifically.

Keith opens his mouth, unsure how to reply, but Amelia happily answers for them both, “Why not?”

For the first time he thinks ever, he hates her. Just for that, though.

Nene cheers again, Darnell joining her. The three start to tread off, Amelia moving to follow. Keith is disturbed, petrified, but has no choice but to follow.

She must really have no clue then, if those two deliberately chose to not tell her a thing.

* * *

The apartment is just a bit cleaner than the last time Keith’s been in it.

Not to say that he was glad about being back in it, but it was significantly warmer than being outside for like an hour.

Nene immediately, excitedly pulled Amelia to her room, shouting something about there not being enough girls to hang out with.

Keith doesn’t miss that slightly stressed twitch in Amelia’s eyebrows.

Darnell plops himself onto the couch for the TV and Pico goes into the kitchen. Keith lingers in the door for a moment, but eventually he sits himself down with Darnell.

The guy looks over at Keith, and just now he notices a phone is pressed to his ear. “Yo, Keith, what kinda pizza you like?”

Keith wasn’t really hungry. “Any kind is good.”

“Cool.” He orders one full with pineapple and a second that is half pepperoni, half sausage.

The blue-haired teen lays back into the couch, crosses his shoulders over his chest. The news on the TV is talking about some robbery that had happened just the day prior.

Keith doesn’t add up all the hints because he chooses to not think about it.

“Keithy!”

He suddenly grimaces, looks up to see Nene sticking her head out of the door.

“Let us paint your nails!”

“Dude, I don’t—”

“PLEASE!”

“C’mon, Keith,” Amelia coos, sticking her own head out right above Nene’s.

Now he couldn’t say no.

The two girls cheered as he got up unwillingly. Darnell even claps him on the shoulder for assurance as he goes.

The bedroom is adorned with typical girl shit (posters, frames, stuff like that, except for the shrine and the blade collection). It leads to Keith asking, “Is this the only bedroom?”

“Yeah. Those two _perverts_ get to sleep on the couch since this is the only bedroom.”

_In a one-bedroom apartment_ , Keith notices. He really could be quite shallow.

“I’ve painted Darn’s and P’s nails before,” Nene grins like it was some Olympic trophy that she’s earned. Amelia smiles as she rolls up the boy’s sleeves. “I’ll let you pick your color.”

The variety isn’t what you’d expect. There’s only one pink (a very light rose), a turquoise, and the rest is varying in black and grey.

He goes with the turquoise and she cheers, “It matches your hair!”

The next twenty minutes (a near quarter of an hour in pure hell, is what it really was) was spent getting laughed at.

Until the doorbell ring, was he finally freed. Nene jumped up and ran.

He examines his hands thoroughly.

“It looks good on you, handsome,” Amelia teases him. Her own were already painted a hot red, by herself probably, but polished over with a clear.

“Shut up.” 

“Pizza’s here!” Darnell calls out.

The two step out of the bedroom after nudging one another and exchanging a brief kiss.

The room hadn’t smelled like anything since they first stepped inside, but now it smelled of pizza, which was immensely better than the weed when he was first here by himself.

As Keith grabs a slice of pepperoni, also at the pizza box, Pico smirks at him. “Love the nails.”

Keith grabs his slice angrily and scurries back to his girlfriend on the couch.

The five watch random shit on the TV as they ate. Nene and Darnell continuously fought with each other after he had insulted her choice of pizza. “That shit is _putrid,_ Nens _._ Who the fuck even eats that shit?”

Amelia doesn’t say anything, but Darnell’s eyes automatically fly out to her. “Amelia, you too?!”

She grins. Keith slightly smiles.

“Pineapple on pizza is fucking nasty, bro.”

“You haven’t even tried it, you dickknob!”

“Yeah, and I don’t plan to.”

“Don’t be a coward like Pico!”

Pico looks offended on the other side of the table. “What the hell!”

Nene puts a palm out in front of the ginger. “Shut it or I’ll stab you!”

Pico shuts up like a puppy following orders. Keith’s eyes bug out of its sockets at that.

“Don’t insult it ‘till you tried it, Darns! Now eat it!”

* * *

His hands are hidden into his pockets, away from view when they’re outside. “Hey, Ams.”

She looks over at him. It’s nearly nighttime, so the breeze is a bit rough through her long hair.

“What did they talk to you about?”

Amelia starts to smile. It makes him nervous, for some reason.

“They talked about when they were in school, how they met and how ever since they remained friends.”

Keith’s brain cools off. He hadn’t realized it started to burn and then steam.

“How about you?”

“Huh?”

“What did Pico talk to you about?”

She waits for his answer as they walk over layers of leaves atop of grass.

He momentarily wonders what would happened if he let the news slip about her father hiring a potential hitman (one that _spared_ the target). Would she choose to still be with Keith? 

He holds in a sigh and says, “Same thing.”


	9. Mambo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some insight to some days leading up to current time. Keith thinks he’s the only one searching for answers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I put so many references throughout this story lmao. Has anyone caught any yet

The clock with the demon sits on the wall jadedly. The neon arrow for a hand rounds every number with a small click.

All the directives have changed. Amelia hadn’t thought that that would happen. At least, not so soon anyways.

It’s like being boarded up into a one-room castle, with stairs that lead you to where you first started. As much as it should be infuriating, she really just finds it insanely boring.

Leniency isn’t a good thing for headstrong, born leaders. She figures the best thing to do is tiptoe around it, being born to two, after all. 

She knows she might have the best judgement in the situation, but not the most _accurate_.

She couldn’t speak for anyone but herself, but she was aware of her wants and her future, and that was enough for her to piece the depiction together.  


A particular night her dad goes out when he never would’ve. She watches from her window as he takes along a briefcase of some sort.

As far as she’s concerned, her whole life the guy’s been a morning worker.

Amelia breaks out and goes looking for the ginger herself.

* * *

“You’re that school shooter survivor, right?” 

A certain twenty-two year old glances up, unexpectedly aggrieved.

“How’ve you been holding up since all that?”

Pico remains quiet, posture hunched over his knees, handgun loose but gripped in his fingers.

The older guy lets a sound (an impersonation of a laugh) off through his chest, like he’s in disbelief for something that hasn’t happened yet. “Gone to therapy?”

Luis leans down so he’s in eye-view with the boy. He isn’t kind, but the question is designedly genuine.

Pico doesn’t have any intentions on answering it, though. They both knew that.

“Or are you too fucked up they can’t take you?”

_They don’t want me_ , is what Pico would’ve (solemnly) corrected if it weren’t Luis he was talking to.

No one wants a kid like _that_ in their institution. It’s the reviews and the image they care most about, not the treatment for the patients or even the patients, themselves.

“Cut the shit. What do you want from me?”

He shows out the briefcase more properly this time, about fucking introduced the thing. It opens with a loud click, displaying various stacks of green paper.

And green paper was all it was.

“I want you to do something for me. This is your reward,” Luis then awkwardly laughs, like one of those uncles that finds their own joke humorous. “Uh, if you succeed, that is. Hehe.”

He doesn’t intentionally act that way. That’s how the guy really was, as much as it surprised Pico.

He was used to it at this point, though. He’s had enough run-ins to know what kind of personality the guy forcibly fronted.

Luis changes his words after seeing the ginger raise an eyebrow. “Think of it as me hiring you as a temporary hitman.”

“Temporary hitman? Me?” Pico actually chuckles. “We’ve been fucking up all your shit this past year, are you really interested in being _friends_?”

“We aren’t going to talk about that,” Luis responds, a bit irritated. He leaves the briefcase opened for Pico to see but moves around the room to blow off some steam.

Pico’s eyes doesn’t leave him, though.

“I just want you to go and take out that boy that’s been trying to fuck around with my daughter.”

Pico perks his head up. “Keith?”

“Yes.” Luis had his back to the ginger, but upon hearing that name, every vein in his big ass body clenches. His voice remains short and innocent. “ _Keith_.”

“Why can’t _your_ men do it?” Pico asks tiredly, leaning into the warmth of his palm situated over his knee.

The dad turned around violently. “You killed them all, you little fuck!”

Pico starts to slowly grin, missing more teeth.

“Ahem. Anyways.” Luis clears his throat, adjusts the lapels on his suit. His voice takes a darker tone. “You owe me, Pico.”

The ginger restrains himself from telling the man that he _owed him jackshit_ , because what he said was true.

“There’s a few hundred grand in that case right there, all for you. If only you get rid of that little blue _bastard_.” 

Pico isn’t sure what Keith’s done to piss the guy off that bad or if it’s just by purely existing, but he definitely isn’t interested in finding out why. 

Luis still gives him a brief summary of it, though.

“I know you need the money,” Luis adds, as if Pico wanted to hear that shit. He tries not to snarl as the businessman approaches his personal space. “You can get you and your buddies several houses each and _still_ have enough money for a lifetime supply of drugs. And maybe rehab.”

Luis knew he struck a nerve.

He leans down to his ear. “How does that sound, Pico?”

Pico does his best not to shoot him in the face right there. 

Luis straightens up in satisfaction, shuts the briefcase and steps away. “You’ve only got one mission. We don’t have to see each other again after that.”

When he’s out of the room, he added, “Don’t fuck it up.”

The ginger is then left grimacing in the dark by himself.

* * *

Keith never imagined that he’d be put through so much shit in the span of only one year.

He was never given the chance to predict when the only source of happiness he had would get taken from him.

_Of course they’d do that_ , he’d think to himself bitterly, strolling outside in public with _reason_.

Amelia wasn’t dead, huge relief, but all her connections with Keith had been cut off suddenly.

Each time he tries to text or call her, the message never goes through.

He doesn’t even see her outside anymore, not even in the diner. (He’d snuck there one day to hopefully find her and speak to her, but she wasn’t there.)

Keith instantly knows what’s happened. He just hopes, eventually, the mother wouldn’t get involved.

He didn’t know anything about her. Not yet, at least.

With no one left to turn to and no other option left, he finds himself going right back to where everything started.

Not the alleyway, but that cramped apartment.

Keith knocks, pulling his hood up with his other hand, feeling like the entire world had its eyes on him. It was an unusual feeling, one he never wished to feel again.

It took a second before anyone answered the door. Nene opens it, her face completely neutral. At the sight of the teen, she faintly smiles and lets him right in without any greeting.

“Keith’s here!” She called out to the rest of the house, but there wasn’t a response.

Keith could hear an unbearably loud buzzing sound. Nene’s wrists were also bleeding uncontrollably, thin slices running all over her arms.

The whole scene just made him uneasy.

Keith, hands pushed into his pockets, followed the buzzing noise after Nene shuts herself into her bedroom, presumably to continue where she left off.

The sound leads him into the bathroom. The door was already swung all the way open, giving Keith a full glimpse of its innards.

Darnell sat on the toilet with the lid down, Pico leaning over him. 

The glass mirror above the sink was high enough to catch only the tip of Keith’s bright red, backwards hat. Pico turns around, a lit cigarette hanging between his lips.

“Keith,” he says, taking it out with two fingers. Puff leaves his mouth lazily. Keith watches it spread.

The guy wore casual shit, just some black shirt and grey sweats. A pair of clippers sat in one of his hands, buzzing loudly as he shaved Darnell’s head.

He clicks it off so that they can chat, the softest smirk on his face. 

“Fuck brings you here?”

It’s not that he _wanted_ to be here. Newsflash; he didn’t. He just didn’t have anyone else.

“It’s about Amelia,” Keith explains to him, rocking just _slightly_ on his heels because he wasn’t yet used to the guy’s towering presence.

Pico just stares at him, almost as if he didn’t care.

“I can’t find her anywhere, and she’s not answering my texts.”

Pico takes another hit. Keith can see all the paraphernalia over the bathroom sink.

Darnell turns around on the seat to smile at Keith. “Keith! Hey, man.”

“Hey,” Keith says back.

“Her parents might’ve done shit,” Pico tells him, eyes washing over him and then the clippers. He steps out of the bathroom, shutting the door behind himself so that the two could talk a bit more privately.

“I fucking knew it,” the teen mutters to himself.

“He wants to lure you in with her so I can have a chance at shooting you.”

Keith jumps up a bit at that. Pico really had more than enough chances to do so.

“So why haven’t you?” He asks him, slightly suspiciously.

Pico must’ve caught that instantly, as he’s smiling back at him. “Do you want me to?”

Keith freezes. “Uh, no—” (obviously not).

The ginger backs him quite literally into a wall, hovering over him and then smiling as he blew smoke aside, just hardly grazing Keith’s skin.

“Don’t you trust me, Keithy?”

Keith doesn’t even know how to answer, because he didn’t trust him. But if he said that, then what if Pico killed him because of it?

Pico sees the way the teen pales, like he’s caught a rare glimpse of a ghost. “He offered me a few hundred-ks’ to get rid of you.”

“I thought you said you weren’t gonna—”

“I’m not. Don’t have a reason to.”

The ginger starts to slyly smirk, turning the cigarette around in his fingers, testing its warmth.

“We could trick him into thinkin’ that I _did_ kill you, and then we could leave this dump _with_ his fucking money.”

Keith’s eyes widen, but it wasn’t because of Pico’s suggestion (that was a very Pico thing to do).

“ _We_? You mean you, Darnell, and Nene?”

“And you.”

But not Amelia.

The air between the two is short and thin. It’s a bit distracting.

The face Keith holds in response tells them everything. He wasn’t leaving Amelia, even if she was the guy’s daughter. How could he?

“Don’t you wanna come with me?” His voice is much lower, much more persuading. 

Keith could see the whites of his eyes are bloodshot. His heart starts beating unmanageably.

“He’s not gonna give up until you’re either gone or he’s dead. You know that.”

_(So why doesn’t he just pick one?)_

Keith turns his head to the side to avoid his gaze and all that smoke pouring out between his teeth, tensed.

He knows what he’s saying is true, and yet, he didn’t have it in him to admit that he’d have to leave her eventually.

“Darnell has cancer.”

Keith blinks back forward. Pico isn’t speaking to him all darkly anymore.

“Doctors gave him around five months left. He didn’t want to go through all that hair loss bullshit, so he asked me to shave it all off before it happened.”

His thoughts bring him back to what he saw in the doorway earlier, Nene and her bleeding wrists.

Was that what happened?

“He survived it before, back in school,” Pico tells him, somehow unbothered by it all. Maybe it was a coverup.

“Thinks he could do it again, but if not, we’re sure as fuck not spending his last months here.”

“I’m sorry,” is all the younger could stiffly muster out.

He isn’t sure what for, though. He doesn’t know if he’s said that because he already made his decision, and it wasn’t the good one, or if those were his early condolences. 

Pico doesn’t respond to his apology either way. 

Nene comes out of her room with bandaged arms. She looks much happier than she had before, however, and immediately goes to jump over the ginger.

“ _Pico_! Oh, Keith! You’re still here?” She looks at the teen. 

He could see blood bleeding right through the bandages.

“How about we have a little fun?”

Keith started to feel a bit scared. Nene was smiling widely, Pico not far behind. He probably already knew what she meant.

She takes out a clear bags of pills. They weren’t really regular looking.

She gets one out, holds it to her lips. “Let me tongue wrestle it into you, Keithy!”

Keith goes red, hands waving her back.

Pico snorts amusedly. “He’s got a girlfriend, Nens. Don’t let her kiss you, Keith. She’s got herpes.”

The youngest then goes pale.

Nene spits the pill out. It goes flying across the carpet. “PICO, WHAT THE FUCK! WHY WOULD YOU TELL HIM THAT?!”

“Because it’s true!” Pico starts laughing as the girl started shoving him.

“THAT WAS YEARS AGO! EVERYONE HAS HERPES!”

He just sort of watches the two fight, which was really just the ginger trying to avoid all her punches and kicks.

She finally drops herself onto the couch with a loud huff, stuffing a pill in her mouth.

Pico sits by her and takes one as well. He looks up to Keith, so does Nene, and offers the bag.

“Fucking asshole,” she scoffed, shoving Pico, who doesn’t do anything but grin.

Keith hasn’t ever done drugs. He’s smoked once, and that was regular store cigarettes back in high school.

He doesn’t know exactly what pushed him over the edge to reach a hand out and take the pill from the bag.

Pico gives him a Cheshire smile, pats the space on the couch right next to him. “Stay a bit. Not like your girl’s goin’ anywhere.”

He wasn’t lying. Keith knew that.

So Keith goes and sits.


	10. Sweet Rubies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An important piece, a traumatizing memory, some banter and then current time. Things start to heat up.

He’s had his fair share of desperation, meaning complaisantly asking a superlative _nobody_ for a brain swap.

In a situation like that, you’d know that clouded judgement and a free hand aren’t necessarily the same thing.

(Sort of like that saying; apples or oranges?)

He grew out of that way of thinking (that beliefs could fix everything), as it never, ever made sense after all these years.

You couldn’t fix the shit in your brain no matter how hard you tried. The best approach was to acknowledge what you did, acknowledge that you’d never do any better, or recover the way that those uniformed bastards promised.   


He was only in that institution for Nene (she jumped out of a window when she thought he had gotten jumped and died).

Not because he was crazy.

Yet, the moment he’s swarmed with affectionate, soothing lies— 

(The _promise_ that they could clear his brain from everything he’s seen as a kid, clear everything that _fucked him_ into the person he was now.)

He killed every bastard dressed in white.

Pico and Nene break out of the hospital (a pair of sharp scissors stuffed away into her arm cast, just to be sure). Darnell picks them up and they have pizza and party.

It was like nothing had ever happened.  
  


* * *

  
Keith had made sure there was about a foot of space between him and the latter when he sat himself down on the tawny couch.

The gift’s he’s given (or more like _brandished_ into taking) goes directly back where it came from. 

When he’s given two identical, flat looks, he doesn’t flinch once.

In other words, his mind screams otherwise.

“You’re a fucking party-shitter, you know that, Keith?” The black-haired girl huffed.

The redhead at her side doesn’t say anything, which simultaneously tells Keith everything.

The table where they all once shared several boxes of pizza (the five of them, not four, or technically three) is splattered with flour.

Keith thinks of the diner.

The two stirrers don’t argue with him anymore after that one line, Nene’s line. They lean against each other, heavily intruding one another’s personal space, over a bag of powder-smeared confetti.

“You got a lucky one,” Nene looks like a cat, grinning like that.

Pico drops the pill right back in the bag, reaches for another one but the girl roughly snatched his wrist.

“You can’t do that, fuckface! You have to pick the one you grabbed!”

“I don’t want that nasty shit.” 

“TOO BAD!”

The blue-headed guest tries not to snicker from his end of the couch.

“I can’t have this shit, Nens, you know that!”

“Shouldn’t have mixed them then, huh?”

Pico pops the pill and mutters under his breath. Nene socks him and starts playing a game that was familiar to Keith.

His leaden eyes flash over the contents in the bag, an honest distraction for the ache brought from reminiscing too hard. 

Apparently, that was a mystery bag of candy for them to play with (suppressants, stimulants, prescriptions, you name it and it was there).

He realizes that everything was really all a game for them.

Killing people, throwing bombs, setting shit on fire; it was pure fun in their eyes.

He’d never understand that way of thinking, unless it revolved around his own interests. But then again, anyone would understand from their own perspective.

When it came to skateboarding or spray painting, it gave him an intoxicating sense of freedom. Nothing you did would feel better than doing the thing that you loved.

The thing these three bastards loved, though, was shit stirring, and he’d landed face-first into a pit of it.

“Want a drink?”

Keith looked up to see Pico, straying from his thoughts. His face doesn’t read anything harmful, much to Keith’s suspicion, so he nods.

“You like hard shit?”

“He doesn’t drink that shit, Pico, look at him!”

Pico ignores her, already slyly smiling and moving off of the couch like a fox.

Keith feels the urge to call out to the guy and tell him he doesn’t drink, but that’d seem uncool. (Just some taught, toxic masculinity. He couldn’t separate the cloudiness.)

“Get me something, too!” Nene shrieked after him.

She then made a sound and tells Keith, “Sorry that asshole likes you so much. He’s such a dick.”

Before Keith could ask her what she meant by that, Pico returns with two hard lemonades and a boxed chocolate milk.

Keith for sure thinks that the chocolate milk was for him, considering his age and all. He’s severely mistaken when the ginger chucked the thing in the girl’s lap.

Why he ever thought that these guys would be the type to follow _drinking laws_ of all things was beyond him.

She picks it up, reads the label, and swung her jaw up. “I can’t drink this shit, Pico, you know I’m lactose intolerant! You want me to fucking explode?”

Pico drops himself back onto the couch with a short, hyena-like laugh. The boxed chocolate milk is thrown with direct strength, though it misses by an inch. She calls him something in her native tongue.

He eliminates all the space by tossing an arm over the headrest above the kid’s shoulders, handing him a bottle.

“It’s light,” Pico assured him as he watches the hesitancy in the teen as he takes the bottle from his hands. 

The bottle read _hard_ which was misleading as fuck, but the teen takes it nonetheless.

He tries not to think about the pressuring heat of a thigh stabbing his own, the inches of contact between two chests.

(It’s the drugs. That’s the _only_ explanation.)

Once the bottle’s popped open, ice-cold liquid rushes down his throat. Warmth blooms throughout his chest as he swallows. It lightly fizzes.

It tasted like lemonade, with an odd aftertaste. It’s far from unbearable, if he’s able to admit the truth.

“Do you do this often?” Keith asks the ginger bravely.

If they were gonna be this close, both physically and as of friendly terms (not that he actually _wanted_ to be friends with Pico. Fuck him), then he was _also_ allowed to be a nosy fuck.

“What?” 

Keith gestures around at the drinks and the dusty bags. 

Pico must’ve caught on because he has this face, then and blatantly lies, “No.”

And that’s pretty much pure bullshit, because every time they’ve unintentionally met up (at least, unintentional when it came to Keith) the ginger was pink-nosed and languorous.

Keith gives him a glare of disbelief. 

“If you wanted to know more shit about me, you could’ve just asked, Keith,” he smoothly jested, taking a long sip from his lemonade.

If he was offering so kindly, Keith would take advantage. “Is all that yours?”

Icy eyes follow the glass brim of the bottle, back towards the wooden table. “The meds?”

“Yeah. And the weed.”

“No, not completely.” There’s a pause, the slosh of liquid. “The weed is Darnell’s. It’s medical.”

Made sense. It also made sense why they shared it amongst themselves. He didn’t have to spare more words and inquest on that. What was strange, however, was the lack of thorough depth.

To be fair, Keith never implied that that’s what he wanted.

“How old are you?”

The question clearly catches Pico off guard, but he easily doesn’t hesitate, “Twenty two.”

“And them?”

“Also twenty two.” 

Darnell beat them by a few months, though. Technically a year.

“Do you have parents?”

“Gee, these are quite personal, Keithy,” Pico smirks at him, all mocking.

“Don’t call me Keithy.”

“I don’t.” Pico’s tone is unreadable. He obviously isn’t bothered by the passing of his family. “But I know you do. And she’s real hot.”

Keith’s heart twitches, in that bad, nearly painful way. 

“I’m just kidding.”

Keith tries not to punch the smirk off of his face.

He wiped the bridge of his nose with the back of his wrist and says, “Why do you always have a gun on you?”

Pico’s eyes watch every uncomfortable movement that the younger man does. He sees those inky eyes trailing to the noticeable bump in the right pocket of his pants.

He doesn’t try to cover it, but he manages to change the subject. “Why do you always wear a hat?”

Keith looks at him with a grimace.

“Are you balding under there?”

“Shut the fuck up, dude.”

Pico laughs at him.

They finish their drinks. Pico doesn’t have another one after that, but he does offer the younger man the fridge.

It has more drinks than anything else.

“Don’t you guys ever cook around here?”

Pico’s looking through the blinds when he responds almost sarcastically, “If we knew how to fuckin’ cook, we wouldn’t order takeout all the fuckin’ time.” 

Keith snorts. “Makes sense. And why do you cuss so much?”

“... Sorry.”

He takes a cereal box out of the closet and eats straight from it.

It was almost an unusually soft response on the elder guy’s end, even if Keith genuinely meant no harm.

Pico removes himself from the window blinds and just kinda stares at him.

“What?”

Pico is silent for a few seconds, eyes leisurely moving over his body. He leaves the kitchen with a short, “Nothing.”

Keith brushes it off as a stray thought. The guy really must’ve had a lot of those.

* * *

When the fuel of the cerebrum seeped, you’re left with the tinier notions. They’re actually real important to be hidden in the back of the brain so often.

It’s what led her to her diner one night, leaning over the counter, lazy curiosity dancing around in her brown eyes.

The ginger seated across from her merely watches.

“I’m worried about him.”

“That’s kinda hypocritical.”

_You’re the cause of all this unnecessary pain_ , is what that meant.

Amelia sighs short and meaningfully. She traces a red nail over the countertop. 

The moonlight, the only source of light, severely confines them to the feeling of luminescence.   


The gun sits in his right pocket untouched, like the milkshake he’s been given for the cost of air.

It’s chocolate. Amelia knew it was his favorite.

When the time clicks twelve in the morning, Pico leans over and smirks at her.

Curtesy of a mutation in the form of brilliance, they share something subtle.

Several small somethings.

Knowledge. A single emotion.

(His elbow meets the table. Her palm resides on his wounded jaw.)

They also share a kiss that night. 

* * *

Keith wakes up with the smallest headache.

His hoodie is gone, a leg hangs off of the couch, and a blanket is thrown over his stomach.

Pico is shirtless and is staring down at him. Keith can see the dry scars of a stab wound to the left of his chest.

“Wake the fuck up, Keithy,” the ginger lovingly sings. “We’ve got shit to do today.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hard lemonade is the shit. Pills make me feel sick though. 
> 
> And if you read this chapter, did I hurt you yet? ;^)


	11. Platinum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A look into how things (really) are. Keith starts to look into the other side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Watch this lmao https://youtu.be/zyVfSdZy-C0

All it takes is a wink and some outdated pickup line, and the ball goes rolling onto their court.

They’d split into pairs once they all traveled, on foot, some streets away from their apartment; two went inside the work building, and the other two staying out.

Keith wasn’t thoroughly informed on what it was that they were doing _exactly_ , but he was told to go in and distract the female employee working at the front desk, which was what he’d been doing successfully until Nene showed up at his side with hands full of bagged treats and an oversized grin.

“I got churros!”

Keith smiles cheekily as he goes to grab one. “Sweet, dude.”

The female worker watches as the unusual pair began eating churros in the middle of a business workplace.

She puts her hands together, goes to tell them that you _weren’t really allowed to eat in a place like that_ , but Keith intervenes with a grin. “Want my number, cutie?”

The worker blushes. Nene offers her a bag. “Churro?”

Before the blonde could reluctantly take it, a ginger showed his head into the doorway of the place. “Yo, dumbasses! We’re late, hurry the fuck up!”

Keith follows the order and rushes out of the building. Nene stayed for a moment just to give the girl the treat before she also fled the scene.

(Sadly, he wouldn’t be made aware that the place would initially be made a _scene_ until the deed had already been done.)

A black car awaited the three on the sidewalk, parked illegally. “Jump in,” says Darnell from the driver’s seat, lazily peering out of the window with a large smile.

As he and Nene climbed into the backseat, the eldest looked through the view mirror and whined. “Aww, wait, you guys got churros? Give me one!”

Nene leans forward with the bunch.

“Where the fuck did you even get those?” Pico asks, glancing around from the passenger seat as he lit a cigarette.

“Saw a guy with a stand giving it to some of the workers, told him I’d show him a good time in the bathroom if he gave me a few.”

“Did you?”

“No. I ran off,” Nene laughs, Pico snorting along with her.

The car jerks into drive, and then they’re pulling out of the parking lot in a few mere seconds.

(Was there really no time to spare?)

The force nearly crashes the blue-haired teen into the door of the car. Nene bumps into his shoulder and curses the known driver loudly.

“I didn’t know you guys had a car.”

The silence ensuing lasts approximately three seconds.

Nene’s the one to break it, replying innocently, “We don’t. We stole it.”

She says it in a tone like they’ve done this numerously, too many times to count. Like it wasn’t _news_.

“What’d you think we were doin’ the whole time? Buying one?” Darnell says jokingly.

Keith tries not to gape for too long, not in the good way. He’s unaware of the pair of incisive blue eyes examining him silently through the frontal mirror. 

The car is submerged in the smell of sugary treats and cigarette smoke. 

He’s distracted an employee as the group went and stole some person’s car. The realization doesn’t really sink in and stay there the way it _should’ve_.

The boy must’ve been stunned for a handful of seconds, because the girl leaned over and took a large chunk off his churro with her teeth. “Hey! Dude! You got your own!”

“Sharing’s caring, Keithy-poo.” 

Pico brings up something about spreading herpes. Nene starts violently kicking the back of his seat.

They’re all laughing, despite the situation. (Keith included)

* * *

The four of them are outside after waking up and getting ready and all that, the wind thrashing and biting the shit out of their ears, considering literally none of them had any  _proper_ attire for frigid weather.

What were the chances they all happened to be summer folk?

Darnell is in the front, arms crossed behind his head. Nene is multitasking, playing a game on her phone.

Pico is right by Keith, hands shoved into the pockets of his jacket they were both so familiar with when the blue-haired teen looked over.

The backwards cap on his head kept his hair in check, but really failed at keeping his ears warm. “What happened to your chest?”

That’s the outcome after a mini dispute with his own, personal thoughts. Originally, he hadn’t intended on saying such a weird thing in the first place (talk about a shit conversation starter. Maybe he just couldn’t get the image out of his head), but Pico meets his gaze with an amused smile.

“Nene stabbed me.”

(Something about landing face-first into her breasts during a fight, and then shooting a can of soda into her face?)

Upon mentioning, the girl stopped in her tracks completely. The ginger nearly rammed right into her, laughing so hard at the memory.

“I hear you talking about me, dickface. Quit it.”

Pico pats her and then lights a cigarette. They continue walking after she doesn’t try to cut one of their hands off.

Now Keith’s never been quite the kicker in conversations. He’s just got this energy that naturally draws in others.

(Seemed to be working a lot in all the wrong places though, right?)

A rush of adrenaline pushes him over the edge. The question comes spilling out of his mouth. “What happened last night?”

It wasn’t like he couldn’t remember anything at all, just to put it all out there  (it was just a _little_ blurry when he strained to remember it all in a conventional sequence).

He mainly wanted to see how much he could really trust the guy.

Besides, you really had to  _ try _ in order to get shitfaced off of a bunch of fruit-flavored wine coolers.

Pico looks back over, clouds spew out of his bruised mouth. “You don’t remember?”

Affliction bombarded the young skater.

With the way the man worded it, it made Keith feel like he shouldn’t remember what happened, even if he did.

Those were called _secondary warnings,_ he believed. They were indirect, but they were still warnings.

Pico starts to grin into the hot mouth of his cigarette, almost as if he’s read Keith’s overly opposing thoughts.

“You talked for three hours and then knocked the fuck out.”

Keith laughs. “Damn... what’d I talk about?”

Pico takes another hit, silently chuckles to himself at the sight before replying, “Buncha shit... don’t worry ‘bout it.”

Keith doesn’t pry, only because the ginger basically asked him not to. It doesn’t lessen all the nerves in his body that’s been slightly bristled, though.

(He can’t handle earthquaking silence. In times like these he’d easily tune everything out with his headphones, but since he’s so frequently unlucky, he catches himself searching.)

Pico puts an arm around his shoulders, tugs the skater into himself and gives him his cigarette.

(The fear is overwhelming. His skin is dredged in maroon, like the variety in an evocative diner or what pooled from a single, lethal entrance.)

He tells himself it’s only because of the cold, because only weather could make you feel cold yet so warm at once. Right? 

And Pico’s only given him a tattered green pullover with a darker collar and sleeves. There wasn’t much warmth to begin with.

The entire thing almost makes Keith regret saying anything. Almost.

When he takes a puff and he doesn’t choke, there’s this shimmer of interest in Pico’s light blue eyes. “Oh, so you’ve smoked before?”

He shrugs him off, but not literally. The shoulder around him is kind of nice. “Back in high school, yeah.”

“How was it?”

“Nothing special.”

Keith hands the cigarette back. The ginger takes a quick turn and hands it right back.

There’s that smirk again. “We should give you somethin’ better then, hm?”

Keith gives him a look, but as quickly as it comes, it fades. It’s always been that way with him.

(Maybe if the barrel of his handgun was aimed at his temple, _only then_ would he not mirror it.)

Pico’s always had bad air around him, yet Keith chooses to stay immersed in it for reasons he couldn’t yet explain. Neither was as stupid as they looked, but one was always exactly _one step_ ahead.

“Ever got a tattoo?”

Keith’s eyes only sparkle. “I fuckin’ love tattoos. They’re so rad, dude.”

Pico’s smirk gets a little wider. He tugs up his sleeve of his jacket, and then again with his black top.

There’s a simple black triangle on the pale skin of his wrist, the same one Darnell had beneath his eye and Nene had on the back of her neck.

“You guys have matching tattoos?!”

Pico glimpses over him almost criminally. Keith temporarily loses his judgment in a state of excitement. “Want one?”

Keith goes in awe. It’s cute.

(But if he gets one, he’d be attached without an end. His vision fuzzes red. That’s the only thing breaking him out.)

* * *

The car is finally parked in the secret confines of a greenhouse, surrounded by a strangely comfy-looking forest.

Keith remains in the backseat as the three got out of their seats and fumbled around on one side of the car. He takes out his phone and starts up a game.

“You know how much he owes, right?”

“No, you fuckin’ turd. Of course I know, it’s my shit.”

“Oh! Can I go? _Please_?” 

“Sure!”

“Well, we can’t _all go_.”

“Then you _stay_.”

There’s a brief few seconds of silence, Keith too focused on the game on his phone to really care. The trio must’ve started whispering, cause then they finally come back into view.

Keith catches Pico leaning against Darnell, the two suspiciously swiping hands, the ginger muttering a word or two into his ear.

Darnell’s face goes stone cold and then he nods. He and Nene leave, one practically galloping, the other with his hands firm in his pockets.

Pico ducks back into the car, sits in the backseat besides Keith instead of the passenger seat. He shuts the door and looks over at him. His eyes are a bit distant.

“What’re ya playin’?”

“Arrow Keys,” Keith replies, not taking his eyes off of the screen, thumbs moving wildly. 

“That’s that stupid game Nens’ always plays.”

“You ever played it before?” Keith looks up with an excited grin.

Pico squints at him.

“C’mon, I’ll show you how to play.”

The ginger remains still as the younger sits up and scoots over. He gives the guy the phone and chooses a low, slow-moving song. “This one is slow. It should be easy.”

“Oh, fuck you, you gave me an easy one?”

Keith laughs as the guy settles into the seat, moving the phone further up to get a good glimpse of it. He watches him easily catch all of the notes. 

“Oh, wow, you’re a _natural_ , bro!”

“That’s cause you gave me an easy one, you little shit,” Pico snaps at him. The teen cackles loudly, throwing a palm on his shoulder.

Pico gives the phone back and shoves a cigarette in his mouth. Keith briskly scrolls through his messages before shutting the damned thing off.

(It’d hurt him if he looked for too long, that was why.)

“... You made your mind up yet, Keith?”

“Huh?” Keith looks up to see the guy staring right at him, half-lidded, smoke filling the space in the backseat. 

Oh. _That_. Pico doesn’t add anything, as he sees that look in Keith’s eyes when he goes quiet. 

He’s obviously stuck between choosing.

See, any smart person would stay in the city and live the rest of their life out there, Keith knew that, but it was hard choosing between staying with a girlfriend that has a father who wants to kill you or leaving town with a group of strangers that also happened to be known criminals.

It kind of sucked either fucking way.

Keith doesn’t understand why the guy doesn’t show any sympathy for his situation. Maybe he just didn’t have any to give.

It was a fat fucking chance, but it didn’t sound as farfetched if you thought about it just a little more, considering the guy’s ‘occupation.’

Keith doesn’t want to conform to that possibility, though. He isn’t aware they share that in common (the random spikes of panic that happen when situations collide with old memories?).

Some earsplitting noises echo throughout the forest, the same ones that he mistaken for fireworks at first.

Keith looks over to see Pico is surprisingly more tensed than he is.

Pico’s a murderer, basically a fucking monster, but this monster looks _scared_.

“Hey,” Keith began, reaching a hand out to the man. His own voice slightly trembles, because he hasn’t ever recovered from all that red splattered over the street, even though he thought that he _had_.

(Darnell and Pico suspiciously swiped hands right before they departed from the car.) 

That knowledge doesn’t strike him _right there_.

“Are you okay?”

“‘M fine,” Pico tells him, spewing smoke out of his mouth. All the fear and unsettledness has disappeared without a trace. He looked as if he had the moment before the gunshots wrung out.

“ _You_ look scared, Keith.”

Keith doesn’t move. Pico smirks at him.

“Never heard gunshots before?”

“Fuck you,” Keith is hardly able to even whisper.

And here he thought he was trying to be nice, do a good thing for a person that looked like they might’ve needed it. 

(Keith was wrong. Apparently, he’s always wrong in this universe. _Or_ , Pico’s just an asshole that guilt trips into things.)

His body is on the brink of quivering. 

Pico smashes the butt of the cigarette against the car seat, flings the thing away before he climbs himself over to Keith.

Pico takes his red hat off, and puts his mouth on his.

Keith gets a mouthful of smoke and temporary warmth colliding against the skin of his lips.

He’s wide-eyed when the guy pulls off and sits back down.

“Feel better?” Pico asks him.

It was really just an impulse thing, on Pico’s behalf. He didn’t know how to cheer people up. This was just an attempt from him.

The question really went both ways, however, so Keith just sits there after he realizes why the guy just did what he did.

He then says dully, “If you were gonna kill the guy, you could’ve just told me, Pico.”

Pico only stares at him. 

Keith grabs his hat, sets it back over his ruffled mess for hair before climbing back over to reach a physical settlement.

(Because he’d rather fucking do _that_ then sit in painful silence knowing a guy was killed under this guy’s orders).

Pico knocks the hat back off and grins when they smash teeth.

* * *

“Ayo!” The car door is thrown open. A large bag is thrown onto console between the two front seats. “I got the shit!”

The two jump into the seats, Nene immediately throwing her feet over the dashboard right after taking off her shoes. Darnell buckles on his seatbelt, and then tosses a silver handgun onto the leather of the backseat.

Pico smirks at Keith (who’s wiping his mouth with his sage sleeve, putting on his hat over his fucked up hair), grabbing the gun in plain view and pocketing it.

The kid already knew so there was no point in trying to hide it. 

He snatches the bag on the console and rummages through it. When he takes out a clear bag, the car instantly suffuses in the stench of weed. His dotted nose wrinkles for a second with how damn intense it was.

Darnell tugged the car out of the slanted parking spot, hitting a slight pothole when the turned back onto the street. 

“Can we get somethin’ to eat?” The girl in the passenger seat nearly whines. 

“Hey, I’m not complainin,’” Darnell shrugged. He uses the GPS on the dashboard to take him to a store chain.

The sky was much darker than it’d been when they first got to the greenhouse, Keith finally notices. The twinging on his neck doesn’t exactly subside when the red bastard leans towards him.

“We could drop you off at your mother’s house,” he tells him calmly, without any hint of anything that made him _Pico_. “S’ your address?”

Keith’s jaw hangs open slightly for a moment. Pico only waits for his response, unblinking.

(It’s a little intimidating.)

“What do you want?” Darnell asks Nene as they’re turning into a drive-thru. 

“Nuggets, you cunt! I get the same thing every time!”

“Oh. My bad! I forgot,” Darnell laughed, scratching his nape.

Nene rolls her eyes and loudly huffs. As Darnell turns around in his seat to ask the two guys in the back what they wanted, Nene practically jumped over the console. “I’ll do it! Just shut up, gosh!”

Darnell puts his hands up in surrender.

“I’ll text it to you,” Keith quietly replies. The ginger nods and settles back into his seat to watch the two imbeciles in the front try and talk over each other.

They get their food after a good minute. Nene reaches a hand in the backseat and Pico nearly attacks at her.

“If you touch my fries, I’ll fucking piss in your cereal, Nens.”

“Jokes on _you_ , I can’t even eat cereal!” Nene sings, snatching a few fries nonetheless. Darnell leans and takes some, too. 

Keith hesitantly leans a hand in to also take some, but the ginger just grabs it and offers it to him _kindly_.

“Now that’s just favoritism!” Darnell groused.

“Pico, you asshole!”

Pico goes to laugh, until she reaches back and snatches the whole bag. “Hey!”

Keith can’t help but grin smugly. 

The ginger doesn’t try to snatch it back, just sighing and handing his phone over to the driver. Keith doesn’t miss that action.

* * *

  
He’s on his porch outside in the cold when he receives a message from two unknown numbers. Keith doesn’t ring the doorbell just yet.

One is from Pico, reminding him to talk to his mother about moving out of the apartment. He isn’t sure how the fuck he’d be able to do that, but he’d text back a _sure_.

The other is from Amelia, on a separate phone. His heart starts to ache and beat in desperation. He messages her back first. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Just to make a few things clear)  
> \- bf actually talked about how much he loved gf for hours and it made P feel bad.  
> \- P doesn’t know how to comfort people, that’s why he did what he did there


	12. Empire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith meets up with gf after a long while, and then with Pico to clear some stuff up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A soft chapter right before all the real shit happens. Enjoy it while it lasts lmao 
> 
> ——
> 
> Y’all here we are, a chapter before the end! What did you think so far? Do you like it? :^)
> 
> Also, did anyone catch the pattern of what happens whenever Keith and Pico talk? If you did, kudos!

“I missed you, Ams,” is the first thing Keith says, stuffing his face into the crook of his girlfriend’s neck.

He does his best to not cry (only because he spent last night and a good duration of this morning sniveling beneath the covers for a multitude of reasons).  


Amelia just weakly hugs him back and rolls her eyes. It really hadn’t even been that long, just about a week and some days.  


The moment they split contact and the girlfriend shows her boyfriend the skateboard with the red prohibition sign scrawled over it, he clamps back onto her with a squeak.

“Are you okay?” She asks, both from the unnatural puffiness on his face and at how he nearly squeezed the life from her.

He grins and shrugs it off as it being because of their reunion, not because he’d been sulking all night, with only one more left to spare.

He eagerly grabs the skateboard, running his hands all over the rough, yet familiar material. “You have no idea how much I missed skateboarding, dude.”

“I bet you did.”

“How did you even get it?” Keith asks, glancing upwards.

She smiles cheekily and then smoothed some hair back over her shoulder. “He was gone all day yesterday, so I used the chance to take it... but I think he might’ve noticed.”

“I think I might just marry you.”

“Stop being so dramatic, Keith. It’s just a skateboard.”

“It’s not just a skateboard! And I mean it, I love you!”

The teen follows after her as they go into some newly-opened sandwich store. 

Since the two of them practically lived for food, they decided their dates would always be at some place that had food.  It was way better than sightseeing, or the zoo, or some other basic shit.

At first, it seemed like a good idea for them three to catch up, discuss everything that they should’ve long ago, but now that he was in her arms, safe from all that danger, he thought that he should just use the time for himself.

“I need to talk to you about... something,” he says with some clear hesitance. 

They’re seated in a booth not quite near the windows, but far from other customers.

Amelia glances up at him. Having her literally right in front of him still failed to soothe all the restlessness in his body. Just thinking of what he still needed to do, kept it rising.

His phone rings exactly once. He gives it but a mere glance.

“Remember that night when we worked together with those three kids? And when I said I needed to tell you something?”

She nods, mainly intrigued by how abruptly serous the guy turned.

“Your dad sent one of them to fuckin’ kill me!”

The brown-haired woman doesn’t spasm in shock, no. She’s naturally calm and levelheaded, but she’s way too fucking calm this time around.   


“I already know, Keith. He, uh... does that a lot,” she laughs awkwardly.

“He does? Wait, never mind that... you _do_? Who told you?”

Amelia’s already slightly smiling because of Keith’s situation, who genuinely didn’t understand how any of this was funny, but she forces it away. 

“Pico did.”

The simplicity of her words are as dulcifying as a million shards of glass being imploded right into his torso. Keith doesn’t even know _how_ to think, much less come up with something to _say_.

She makes a sound through her teeth, like an audible wince. “Yeah, I should’ve told you earlier, but he said you didn’t know yet, and I didn’t wanna scare you.”

Another message wrung out from his phone. This time, he ignores it.

“We also kissed, but it didn’t mean anything, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

As if the pain of hearing that the guy deliberately chose to tell his girlfriend first wasn’t bad enough, then the part about where they kissed _was._

It really felt as if he’d just been kicked in the groin. He couldn’t get mad at her, though, because...

“He... kissed me, too,” Keith mutters, looking away to the side.

Amelia chuckles amusedly into her hand. She has no reason to be mad, either. “Guess we’re equal?”

Keith’s face burns a deep _red_.  


* * *

  
For the first time in what felt like months, Keith was able to ride around the streets freely on his skateboard, without the need to take another route or hide his face from the public.

Not that they were searching.

He heard about some businessman’s car being stolen on the news during dinner, however.

(His mother made a face at him as he choked on his spaghetti. He apologized and proceeded to try and _not_ make it obvious that he was involved in the fucking scene.)

The feeling was liberating, even if it felt like the weather was twice below freezing than what it really was.

It’s bright enough outside that he can see relatively good, but dark enough so that all the street lamps were turned on. 

All the trees had been long stripped of their leaves some days back. Since he just happened to live in a shitty state, it never snowed. The closest thing he’d get to snow, however, was rain or hail.

(And skateboarding in hail weather was literal fucking hell, believe him.)

Keith shows to an apartment housing, skidding off of his skateboard and shoving the thing under his arm. He goes up several flights of steps before knocking on a particular door.

Pico answers after several seconds. The skin beneath his eyes were rubbed a rough purple. His hair looked intentionally yanked, as if he’d been doing it himself.

Nonetheless, he smirks. “Hey, baby.”

“Shut up. Don’t call me that,” Keith snaps, moving past him into the apartment along with his skateboard. Pico watches, still smirking.

The teen drops himself onto the couch, puts the skateboard down at his feet. He loosely crosses his arms over his knees, watches the ginger lock the door and then move to the couch to sit by him.

The living room was surprisingly not as messy, except for some clothes thrown around here and there, and all the drugs and shit on the table.

It was also awfully quiet, so Keith asks, “Is Nene and Darnell here?”

“No.”

“Where’d they go?”

“They went somewhere real quick,” Pico replies, eyes on his own hands as he lit a blunt.

For the first time, at least in Keith’s eyes, he wasn’t nursing a regular store cigarette. That one was self-made.

Pico looked back up at him. “Somethin’ happened?”

He shakes himself out of his thoughts, remembers why he came here. “No. I went and saw Amelia today.”

“You two are _still_ together?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Coulda sworn she fuckin’ ghosted you.”

“Why would she?”

(He says it like he hadn’t just let Pico suck a hickey into his neck in the backseat of some stolen car, the very one he _hid_ today by wearing an oversized hoodie.)

Keith instantly regrets replying with that because the older man gives him this smug ass look.

“Shut up.” 

Pico grins but, fortunately, says nothing. Keith sighs, laying back into the couch and allowing the guy to smoke his shit freely.

In a way, it was nice. 

He hadn’t realized that all that stress from everything, toppled over the fact that he spent nearly a day crying (mourning for the life he’s lost) really tired out his body. He was sluggish yet jerky in every different limb.

“I think I’ll stay.”

The room was already quiet, but somehow it’d gotten even more quiet, like a morning in a graveyard, or alone in the deepest depths of a pool.

Pico doesn’t look right at him immediately upon hearing that. He takes a few more hits, lets the taste linger on his tongue before finally meeting his gaze, but Keith doesn’t meet it back.

“I can’t leave.”

He lived with his mother, just a year out of high school. He had a girlfriend. He grew up in this town, didn’t know any place elsewhere.

There were too many reasons for Keith to stay, and so little for him to leave.

Pico stares back at the ceiling, continuing to smoke.

  
They sit there and silence for the longest moment, it’d be almost eerie if it weren’t for the unusual ache that twinged in either bodies. 

Neither knew each other well, yet hearing that somehow... hurt? It was strange.

Keith finally adds, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

The blue-haired teen looks away from the ceiling to look at the ginger. The guy was still smoking, but Keith had caught a quick glimpse of him checking his phone.

When Pico looks over, there’s that fucking smirk.

“Do you want me to stay?”

“Didn’t say that.”

He takes one last hit before killing the fire on the edge of the table. He gets up and goes to the kitchen. Keith contemplates getting up and following him for a good ten seconds.

When he does, Pico’s in the fridge, the sound of glass moving around in the room. He handed the younger a beer. 

“So you want me to go with you?”

Pico opens his own beer and takes a sip. “Didn’t say that, either.”

Keith furrowed his brows. He follows the taller back into the living room, where the elder lazily tosses himself over the couch. Keith doesn’t sit, though. “So then what do you want?”

Sometimes the man could just be so infuriating. Keith is thankful for the fact that he’s already opened his own beer, otherwise he’d already have broke it over the guy’s head.

“Why’re you askin’ me this?” Pico looks a bit irritated.

“‘Cause I wanna know.”

_But you don’t care_ , Pico thinks to himself, but even as much as he wanted to think that it wasn’t a lie, it was. Keith did care, he’s just fucking stupid.

“Stop being a fucking dick, dude.”

Pico starts laughing. Keith almost huffs, but he knows that’ll only fuel the guy, so he sits down on the couch and drinks.

Beer tastes like absolute shit.

The mood the moment prior was painful but peaceful, but now it was just completely ruined. Since he planned on staying in town, he really had no reason to stay in contact with Pico.

That was, until Pico looked over at him indolently, and announced, “I like you, Keith.”

Keith, for one, wouldn’t try to deny the statement, because it was true. He just had reasonable issues with it.

He should deny the confession and leave the room right fucking there, but what comes out of his mouth is a small, pathetic, “You do?”

Pico only responds with a leer. The direction of which his light eyes were focused gradually descends. It makes Keith noticeably more sheepish.

Like the older had been anticipating, there’s a shift in where the river’s been flowing.

“We’re leaving tomorrow.”

Keith grips the torso of his drink a bit tighter and says, more bravely, “Can she come with us?”

As he readies himself for that blunt _no_ , Pico surprises him with a, “Sure.”

_Sure_? The whole time, Pico had absolutely _detested_ the idea of allowing Keith to bring his girlfriend with him when they planned to leave town. Why did he so suddenly change his mind?

Keith’s heart starts pumping wildly, like he’s been injected with something. He’s thinking of all the possibilities they had, the life they could have together (he and Amelia) once they left this shitty ass town when Pico tugs him by the front of his hoodie.

The beer in his hand had been loose, so the thing falls out of his grip and spills onto the carpet. Keith looks to it and then at Pico, who’s still holding his own beer while gripping the younger with the other.

Pico yanks him in and kisses him.

It’s a rough meet but with a slow end, too slow for Keith to have been surprised by the act, which leads him to believe that he liked it.

Keith shoves him back, starts rambling with the whole dedicated relationship bullshit. You know the kind. 

So Pico just gives him this unimpressed stare, but it was the latter who was the one to continue with it (climb over his lap, feel his hands over the sides of the guy’s pale waist).

Pico smirks at him widely, licks a stripe beneath the guy’s jaw when he says, “Don’t you gotta girlfriend?”

“Shut the fuck up.” 

* * *

It’s half past three in the morning when Darnell and Nene finally return from the hospital. He’s carrying her into the apartment when he spots Pico picking up all the illegal shit thrown around the room. “Hey, P.”

Pico doesn’t need to say anything for Darnell to be able to detect the worry written all over his face. He just smiles softly and says, “She’s fine.”

Her arms are thickly bandaged. It almost looked like two casts. Pico follows the guy, watches as he pulls a blanket over her.

The two retreat from her room and crack open two beers. They’re halfway in when Darnell starts snickering. “Dude, what’s that on your neck?”

It hadn’t hit Pico right away until the older guy started leaning in, just about fucking yells, “Is that a fucking hickey?”

“Shut the fuck up or I’ll shoot your dumbass.”

Darnell starts laughing.


	13. Teen Spirit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s the day of. Things might or might not go according to plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated end!  
> (Technically it isn’t the end, cause some serious shit happens after they all get settled, but that’ll be saved for a 1/1 fic I’ll post later.) ;^)
> 
> The next chapter of this fic will be an alternative ending, if you’re interested.

“Did you even sleep last night?”

Judging by the way Keith had been laying on the couch, it hadn’t looked like he’s been budged to make room. Not to mention, several finished blunts sit in a pile on a little tray.

Pico’s started that right after they’ve finished touching. (Leads him to truly believe that the guy either hardly ever slept, or had an undisputed addiction.)

Keith shoulders into his shirt, looking to a ginger sprawled out on his back on the floor. The silence he gets is the only response.

He slides himself to the left of the couch, hooks his legs over the edge so that he’s peering over the body.

Pico gets a bit irritated by the kid’s unnecessary gawking, so he suddenly sits up, knees digging into carpet, and throws his palms around either of the kid’s thin ankles.

Keith goes falling with a grunt when he’s heaved forward. Pico keeps Keith’s legs around either side of his own, and then hunches forward so that they’re backed against the bottom cushion of the couch.

When their crotches touch, his eyes become the epitome of rounded blocks of coal.

“You’re fuckin’ nuts, Pico. You know that, right?”

“But you fuckin’ love it,” Pico grins in reply, running his eyes all over the position they’ve got going.

Keith only scoffed. He boldly takes the cigarette out of the latter’s mouth and takes a hit.

(Regrets it right afterwards as it isn’t just plain tobacco.)

The sensation is like a fire, the flames building up his throat and burning him to a fourth degree. 

“The fuck is this?” Keith desperately tries to tame his painful coughs but to no avail.

“Weed,” the ginger is smiling ear-to-ear, all the while exploring the skin of the other’s throat with his freckled nose. “You fuckin’ pussy.”

“I’ve never done it before, dude!”

“Here’s your first. Now keep goin’.”

Keith follows the offer and takes another taste. The burning in his throat isn’t any undermined, but at least now he knows what to expect.

He shoved a hand into the older man’s chest after a particularly painful nip to the collarbone. They both sit back on their asses. “Stop. I gotta go home.”

Pico’s eyes dim tediously. He lets go of the undersides of the teen’s knees, but he’s still smiling, as always. “Your mommy’s gonna fuck you up.”

Keith can’t control the frown. “I know. Don’t remind me.”

Pico laughs lowly. Keith shoved the steaming thing back into the other’s hands and made for his jeans which were thrown across the floor.

Pico takes a few tastes of non-medical, laced weed and glances up. “I’ll pick you up later.”

Keith looked over a shoulder. “What? Why? She’s gonna kill me for not being home these past few days!”

“So? You’re eighteen.”

The blue-haired teen blinked. 

“What? You forget that or some shit?”

“No, I just...” He goes quiet, not really knowing how to finish the sentence (without sounding like some typical teenager with an overused excuse).

The ginger was already silently deriding him. It made him more timid.

Keith gives in with a sigh. “Where’re we going?”

“Wherever you wanna go.”

The younger’s eyes light up. Pico is able to contain a smile by the skin on his teeth at the sight.

“How ‘bout that new Subway?”

Pico snorts and smokes, “Fatass.”

Keith shoved him playfully. The ginger kills the fire on the edge of the table, some depraved look scratched over his mouth.

“Why’re you looking at me like that?”

“‘S our first date.”

Keith shoved him again, twice as hard.

* * *

  
  


The way home was unexpectedly comforting, even if they were already mid-deep into winter.

Pico would’ve offered to drive him back to his house if it weren’t for the fact that they drove the stolen vehicle into some lake.

Keith said it was fine and that he’d skate his way home. He missed doing such, anyhow.

The walk up his front porch, however, was one of the most blood-chilling things he thinks he’s ever felt this past month or so. 

It was like he was about to come face-to-face with a serial killer.

He rings the doorbell. It’s not even a half minute before his mother answers.

“Where’ve you been?!”

“Friend’s house,” he says, nervously grinning, skateboard infamously stuffed beneath an arm.

That surprises her right out of her interrogation. “Since when did you have friends?”

Keith nearly loses the grin. “I always had friends, mom.”

Her face is incredibly disbelieving at the reply.

“Uh, can I come in? It’s kinda really cold.”

She steps aside from blocking the entrance so Keith could go right in. As he makes a break for the shower, she pulls him into a hug from behind.

(It isn’t very often that they hugged or showed outright, familial affection, so it was, of course, weird when they did.)

Keith just puts up an awkward smile and feebly hugs back, cause he doesn’t really feel anything for it just yet.

The shower he takes is long and summery. He’d just stand beneath the spray for a good few, long minutes, enjoying the warmth from the long ride home.

His phone rung from its place on the edge of the sink. The message was sent from his partially forgotten girlfriend.

It doesn’t make any sense how he’d been able to do such a fucked up thing, but he knew why. Of course he knew. He just hated the sound of it. 

He scrubs every inch of his body, hair and head included (to try and scrape the guilt off).

It wasn’t like it mattered, though. A combination of water and soap would be impossible to wipe off both physical marks and his lack of accountability.

Another message lets him know that he’s still not exactly done for today. 

He intends to fix everything, though. He’d give her the world if he could (he just continues to manually fuck things up with a group of junkies).

But for now, he accepts that he isn’t a good boyfriend. Far from it.

On the way back out, he hugs his mother (for the last time) a little tighter, with a bit more affection. Obviously, she’s confused by the action, but still hugs back.

Keith is silent for the rest of the way out.

* * *

“Fuck’s up with your face?”

Keith deeply blinked, wrinkles his eyebrows and puts a hand to his face doubtfully. “Huh?”

They’re outside on the street, walking side by side to that new Subway place Keith was so excited about. (The kid was excited about anything food-related.)

Keith already has his hands deep into his jean pockets, couldn’t go further. Pico’s looking at him from the side, even as they walked.

The thing, though, was that it looked like he didn’t care that the younger had been crying.

“I took a quick nap,” Keith replies, and they both know it’s a thin lie, but that’s the end of it.

They go into the shop (hiding the day’s impending apprehensiveness, either opting for silence), and immediately upon order, Pico orders a sandwich with only cheese.

“Who the fuck goes to a Subway and orders only cheese?” Keith makes a face.

(The mood lightens significantly.)

“I do, bitch.” Pico takes his sandwich, pays for them both, and immediately rushes back outside. Keith follows after him.

“We could’ve eaten inside,” he borders a whine, hugging his arms, and also the bagged sandwich, to his chest in strives of warming himself.

The latter, however, is thinly dressed and already halfway finished with his sandwich as they walked back out on the streets.

“No time.”

“Five minutes down the drain is fine, dude. It’s freezing outside!”

Pico peeks over his shoulder, offers lowly, “Want me to warm you up?”

Keith stops in his tracks. An ample amount of blush pours over the skin of his face.

“Then shut the fuck up. C’mon, we’re late.”

The guy turned back around and sped his pace up. Keith has to slightly speed walk to keep up with him.

They eat and chat sparsely to wherever it was that they were going.

So much for it being a ‘date.’

A curt turn around the block, they run into some female jogger with a dog. It’s a wheat-colored Doberman, completely trained and also on a leash, not that any of that mattered.

It started to bark at the pair. Now, Keith is a natural dog lover, so usually he’d go and pet the creature (if the owner was okay with it, though), but his partner was evidently disturbed.

(Disconnected from reality? His blue eyes are abnormally hazy.)

Pico had dropped the food he’d been holding, whipped out a silver semiautomatic pistol and aimed the barrel at the dog’s forehead without hesitation. 

Keith feels his heart stop.

(He couldn’t let history repeat itself again, although it already had, though in a more _bearable_ technique. He was tired of the color red.)

He drops his own sandwich and shoved the ginger, who forcibly doesn’t _budge_. The barking increases to an insufferable level, nearly makes their ears numb.

The jogger had started screaming, creating an even louder disturbance.

“Pico, what the fuck?! Stop!”

He throws both hands over one of the guy’s elbows (grips him with all the strength he has), and tugs and tugs.

Pico simply switches the pistol to the other hand, and curls a finger over the trigger. His grip on the weapon is crushingly tight, but there was some clear shakiness in his movements, some Keith failed to see.

The dog rushes forward, stopping a foot only because of the short length of the leash.

“It’s a _fucking dog_ , Pico! Stop!”

The teen resorted to stepping in front of the distraught man, ignoring the dent of the barrel stabbing at his back. The jogger runs away screaming.

“I’m sorry, lady! I’m sorry! Please don’t call the... cops.” He trails off.

It’d be as equally pointless as useless to continue talking to her. He releases a much needed sigh before turning around.

The ginger’s still in that senseless state. His eyes are focused on where the dog once was, though his aim with the gun and his elbows were lowered.

Keith doesn’t know what to do. He’s never seen him like this.

“You alright, man?” He tries looking into his eyes, but he doesn’t get a reaction. “You afraid of dogs, or somethin’?”

The ginger blinks once, a second time. He puts the pistol into the pocket of his green jacket. Right after, he strokes a hand over his face, through his hair, and then he grips.

Keith shifts his balance from one foot to another. He reached a hand out, pulls (with some difficulty) Pico’s fist away from his vibrant locks.

“Hey,” he says in a near whisper, ultimately deciding against even medium speaking volume. “Don’t do that. We should go now, right?”

Pico raises his eyes. They’re still a bit clouded, like he’s reliving something and can’t quite get out of it, but he acknowledges it with no words or movement.

Keith nods at him. Slowly, he takes the first step, starts into a slow stride. Pico follows after a few seconds in, twice as sluggish.

He realizes that his heart’s beating a mile a minute. Pico’s is beating several.

* * *

  
The crack of evening is, what he considers, the _temperamental_ _moment of truth_.

They’ve stolen another car, unbeknownst to Keith until the thing pulls up to the corner they’ve been situated at for a minute.

Darnell’s in the driver’s seat, Nene in the passenger, leaving the backseat for the two young men. They aren’t in there for long together (the minutes of what happened there two nights ago burning in Keith’s brain).

The car is left in a parking lot behind some random auto parts store. 

Darnell has this black bag with many pockets slung over his shoulders. Nene’s wearing a weird coat. The whole situation was just weird.

“What’re we doing?” Keith asks Darnell, as they’re the only two in the back.

He was tired of the cold. (Even more tired of all the secrets.)

Weren’t they supposed to be on the way to the diner, not walking in a group towards the city?

“Nah, we got somethin’ we need to do first,” the guy replies casually, adjusting the strap over his chest. A pair of abnormal goggles are kept across his forehead, right over the beanie he wore.

Keith gives him a puzzled look. Darnell doesn’t give any more details. Once they hit a chain of houses, Pico clutches the teen by one of the lapels of his jacket, yanking him into an alleyway.

It was the same one the night they met, back on Heaven Street. Keith’s eyes widen when he sees the ginger take out his handgun.

Darnell and Nene are out of sight. They don’t bother going into the alleyway with them.

That frightens him out of his mind.

“What are you doing?” Keith asks, looking around himself.

The ginger doesn’t say anything. He cleans off any drug dust off of the thing, keeps it in one hand but uses the other to grab the teen by his shirt.

“Don’t kill me,” he says shakily, nearing a plead. Pico shuts him off by kissing him roughly, shoving a knee right between his legs.

Keith can’t find the will to focus.

Unlike Pico, his eyes aren’t closed. His vision goes a bit blurry, fueled by the image of him getting shot in a fucking alleyway, of all places. He isn’t sure if it’s tears or not.

Pico presses his knee in harder, kisses him rougher. Keith feels a string of blood seeping down their connected lips.

He doesn’t quite wait for the bullet to strike him in a lung. Pico breaks himself off, licking over the man’s bloodied lips before handing him the gun.

This one was jet black. His usual silver pistol was still stuffed into his jacket.

“Good luck,” he smirks at him.

“Huh? What the fuck are you talking about?”

Keith isn’t given enough time to comprehend what the fuck’s happening, or what just happened. The ginger snatches him again by his scruff, yanked him out of the alleyway and pushed him into Darnell, who grins down at him.

“You ready, Keith?”

Keith doesn’t answer just yet. He looks back to see Pico and Nene already a number of feet away, walking quicker, further.

Darnell grabs his hand and they start walking the other way. The bag is still on his shoulder.

What’s he gonna do with it? The car is still in the parking lot. Amelia’s still at the diner.

The fuck were they doing?

“I suggest you put that thing away,” Darnell says in a joking tone, like they weren’t carrying various weapons. “Y’know? Before someone sees it?”

Keith’s response is a jumble of different questions. Darnell chuckles at him, slaps his shoulder out of comfort.

“Don’t worry ‘bout it. It’ll be fun.”

“What will?”

Keith goes unanswered. His heart is still thumping against his ribcage from the moment he was tucked between the wall and Pico, a gun set off safety mode pressing into his gut.

Where they still planning on keeping him alive? He feels a little less scared, considering the fact that they’ve been given plenty of chances. Maybe they just wanted it slow.

Darnell leads him out to a building, a familiar one (the one he _vandalized_ not too far long ago). They go around the back, sneak in through what looked to be a janitor room.

That was where the guy took the bag off his shoulders, dropping it to the ground with a surprisingly light thud. He hunches down to rummage through it. Keith just stands there, pocket unusually heavy bearing the weight of a gun.

“You’ve never done this before, so I’ll do most of it, and you’ll be my backup.”

Keith shoots the guy a confused stare. Darnell grins at him happily.

“Like a sidekick!”

“Sidekick?”

“Oh! Someone’s coming!” The taller guy snatched Keith by his hood (what was up with people doing that?) and hid them both behind a white pillar.

The person who entered was some guy in his mid-thirties. He wore a midnight blue jumper, clearly a janitor. As he shows his back to the hidden pair, reaching for a mop, Darnell peeks out from behind the pillar and shoots him in the neck with a handgun. 

The thing looked funny. It was a regular pistol but with an extension gear added to it.

Keith realized, by the lack of the excruciatingly loud _blam!_ , that that was a silencer.

The guy goes flaking, dropping face first into his own pool of blood. The pinpoint accuracy Darnell has kills the man instantly.

Red began to stain the cracked tiles. Keith gapes in horror.

“One shot! Hell yeah!” Darnell puts the silencer back into his jacket. He goes over and picks his bag up, a suspicious looking pouch in the hand that once held the gun.

Keith catches himself searching for the nearest exit right after he’s _barely_ able to rip his eyes away from the dead body in the room.

“C’mon, Keith. We gotta go.” He grabs him by the shoulder, easily takes him out of the room because Keith doesn’t even try to fight it.

The skin of his lips are still split. The taste is metallic.

The two head into a corridor. Darnell pauses to open the pouch, digging through it. He tugs out roundish objects, about one or two of them.

The objects are a deep juniper, decorated in curving lines and slung over two of his fingers by the metal hoops like rings.

“Usually, I’d just toss these into a window or somethin’, but since it’s a building full of these jackasses, we’ll give it to them up close and personal.”

Keith remains still and quiet as he watches the guy slam open several doors. He turns back to look at the younger guy. “Ready?”

Keith stiffly nods.

Darnell grins. “Nene would’ve loved this, but she had to stay with Pico.”

The younger snaps out of his submissive trance. “What do you mean? I thought Pico would’ve loved to blow shit up.”

Darnell shakes his head. “Nah, man. It doesn’t sit right with him.”

Doesn’t sit right? Keith would go and question him further about that specific topic, until some guard showed into the other end of the hallway.

“Hey! You two!”

They look up in a rush. Several guards are rushing towards them. Darnell loudly cusses and Keith struggles to not blow a vessel with how fast his pulse is going.

“Shit! Run, Keith!” 

Keith hesitates for some reason. He watches the guards approach Darnell at a fast pace.

Maybe it’s the guilt, or how good of a person he is, or the fact that, despite how bad Darnell was, Keith considered him a friend. He couldn’t just _leave_ him there.

Darnell takes one of the grenades off of his knuckles. He inserts the metal ring into his mouth, rips it off with his teeth and chucks it into the crowd of security.

Most of the guards glanced back to see what it was the man threw, the rest still heading towards him. Darnell throws an arm around Keith and shoved them both into a sprint back into the supply room.

Darnell’s still got one more grenade on him, not including what was in the bag. They’re barely able to duck behind some dumpster when a thundering boom reverberates throughout that section of the city.

Even outside of the place, Keith’s ears slightly ring.

When he looks up, a chunk of the building is blown right through, both large and small pieces of the wall thrown everywhere. The dust of the grenade and the paint on the walls sprayed up, mixing with the fumes of a newly created fire.

There’s a glimmer in either of their eyes, but with separate reasoning.

“Fuck yeah! Look at that shit!”

Keith turns his head to see the guy rip the ring off of the second grenade, tossing that one into the exposed mess of the building.

There’s another boom, the two on their knees behind the grey dumpster, which rattled a bit at the weight. 

The second grenade had been worse, did a lot more damage than the first. This one sent the upper stories of the building tumbling down, crushing the workers inside.

They could hear the faint screams of people, see some blood splattering out like paint in the destruction.

Darnell grins at the aftermath. It was a masterpiece in his eyes.

Keith doesn’t differentiate it from the way he sprays red signs over about everywhere. Maybe he’s just too fucked up to be thinking like this.

“C’mon, we gotta pick the others up.” Darnell picks up his shit and starts running. Keith bolts after him. “I’m happy she’s not the one driving. She can’t drive for shit.”

The younger lets out a weak smile (compared to Darnell’s booming laughter) the first in the span of what felt like several hours.

* * *

Keith does his best to not have a breakdown just yet in the passenger seat.

Darnell drives them down a familiar street, the one he used to walk down with Amelia as he walked her home.

He’s reliving everything he thought he wouldn’t have to. It brings him a lot of heartaches, like a hand burst through his chest and clawed out his insides. (It just fucking _hurts_.)

They park into the driveway of some fancy looking house. They sit there in sheer silence, Darnell just staring down at the screen of his phone.

Tearing his dark eyes away from the scenery outside of the window, Keith glances back over to the guy.

Darnell suddenly jumps out of the car, runs into the house. Keith chases after him. 

Once they surge into the house, they catch a chilling glimpse of Nene wounded on the ground. Pico’s dropped by a hand on his neck, and there’s some swelling over his left eye.

The owner of the hand wields a gun to his face.

Darnell goes right to Nene’s side, pulls her over so that her back’s against the carpeted ground. Keith stays in the doorway. 

He could turn around and back out of this right now.

It might’ve seemed too late this far through (he wonders if this had been the plan the trio were discussing so frequently. If so, it wasn’t as thought out as Keith thought it’d be), but the door was still open. _Wide_ open.

There isn’t a delay of Luis firing a bullet right into Pico’s stomach when he was distracted. Shards of shrapnel spread throughout the meat of his chest. He lets out a pained sound.

Keith goes and does something he might later regret. Maybe he might not. It all depends on how it plays out.

He takes the handgun out of his pocket, aims it at the guy’s back and shoots. It wasn’t a silencer, so there’d been two loud pops all in the same minute.

(Pico hadn’t set it on safety from the start. What an asshole.)

When the big guy falls, Pico weakly kicks him away. He winces in clear pain. Keith rushes over, hands immediately flattening against the thick blood staining through his shirt.

It wasn’t stopping, even with all the pressure.

“You just killed your girl’s dad,” Pico grins at him. He’s got a mouthful of blood, staining all his teeth. He spits out a mouthful. “That’s some tough shit.”

“Shut up.”

The ginger weakly chuckles, continues to do so as the young, blue-haired teen shoved his face into his neck.

“Please... just shut up. _Please_.”

Keith gets an intense whiff of blood and cigarette smoke, the way the ginger’s always smelled since he met him that night.

His own clothes and the skin of his hands are stained a deep red. It doesn’t stop him from laying over the guy’s weakened body, doesn’t stop his heart from fucking aching.

“You’re a dumbass, Pico.”

Keith pulls back just enough so that he could meet those blue eyes, which were more fogged and misty than they’d ever been.

Pico only laughs at the kid bawling his heart out into his bruised, bloodied neck.

* * *

The bathroom window provides a balanced view of the city, which was currently flooded in flashing lights, cars and red trucks.

A cooking pot was settled in the middle of the living room, gathering all of the drops of water that leaked through the ceiling from the apartment room right above.

The sound of water hitting a flat surface was aggravating, even from a distance away.

“You know, you’re not a good liar, Keith.”

He can’t help but grin, even with their ( _his_ ) circumstance. The tenderness over his eyelids hadn’t faded. His jacket is smudged and smelling of metal.

It probably wasn’t the best idea using that whole  _ hypothetical _ argument. He sucked with lying, surprisingly.

Definitely too specific in some places. All the leads added up to what they had here.

“He does that a lot,” says Amelia, on the other end of the line.

She’s behind the counter they both knew well and loved, apron tied neatly over her skin-tight dress. She has no _idea_.

“Not sure if it worked just yet.”

Keith doesn’t say anything when slack laughter literally fills his ear. He grins back, even if it wasn’t really funny.

When he looks at himself in the mirror, he sees a grimace. 

He strips himself of the hoodie afterwards, washes his hands with soap.

Contempt courses through his body. It’s certainly destructive, but it definitely wasn’t imposed on himself by himself. That’d be fucked up, right?

(Isn’t that common among people? Self-blame?)

“Well, I’m almost done for the day. Hardly any customers.”

Keith keeps the phone to his ear and peeks through the window. “I fuckin’ miss workin’ there.”

“Seriously? I’m tired of it even though I just got back.”

“Sell it,” Keith responds instantly, impulsively. _You’re out on a whim. She isn’t that stupid, Keith_.

What would her parents do if she had? Well, one’s fucking dead, so it shouldn’t matter.

Amelia’s shuffling through something, which the audio picks up with a little fuzz. She balances the phone against her shoulder. “You know, you’re right. I’ve been meaning to.”

“Ha. Don’t listen to me. I’m stupid.”

“No, no. You’re completely right.”

Keith can just hear her wave him off with her manicured hand, the same loose jewelry as her mother.

Keith makes a face, but there’s a relieved smile. “You’d do that for me?”

“And for myself, obviously.”

They both short childishly. They’re still technically considered teens, or young adults, whatever you preferred. That didn’t mean any of their immaturity had evaporated, though. Clearly, it hadn’t.

Keith slightly struggles with keeping the smile on his face. It’s really only there for her. His cheeks start to hurt from the awkwardness of his stretched lips.

(He wants to smile for her even if she couldn’t see it.)

“You know I love you, right, Ams?”

Amelia lets out this breath, not an annoyed exhale or anything, but it lets the latter know that she really, truly did like him. 

“Of course, Keith. I love you, too.”

She rolls her eyes and Keith genuinely smiles.

“I’ll see you later. Be careful.”

Amelia lifts an eyebrow, unbeknownst to the guy, but she doesn’t ask him to clarify. Probably just some boyfriend instinct.

Keith exits the bathroom with nothing but his phone and his emotional constipation.

Pico’s shirtless, some ivory bandages strapped over the blemishes on his stomach, and nursing a cigarette in his mouth, a handgun in his hands.

He doesn’t look up when Keith approaches him, remains stocking the magazine with silver bullets.

Keith isn’t the one with the injury, but his stomach hurts much more than the person’s in front of him.

“You okay?”

The words feel a bit tattered on his tongue, like they shouldn’t have come out at all.

Keith opts to sitting himself down on the couch besides him, trying to not think about them drowning in beer just a day ago.

“You worried about me?” Is what the ginger replies. It’s not rhetorical but it’s also not authentic.

Pico’s just mocking him, as per usual.

Unsure with what to say next, the younger man sits in silence, listening to every clink from each bullet being inserted.

Luckily for him, Pico gives him a brief side glance.

“He’s not dead, Keith.”

But the tone is mean, cruel, like they didn’t know each other.

Keith’s eyes widen, larger than any planet. There’s a hole of sunshine in the clouds of the storm. “Luis? You mean he’s alive?”

Pico gives him a look before glancing back to his gun. 

He then knocks the gun shut, cocks it, and stands up from the couch. “S’ why we’re going back to finish him.”

That small shimmer of hope is cracked into several pieces, too small to put back together. Nothing good lasts forever.

Keith, unthinkingly, grabs his arm and stops him from leaving. “You don’t have to, dude.”

Pico snatches his arm back. “He shot me in the fucking stomach.”

“You could just let it go.” But Pico’s never let anything go before, no matter how small or stupid it was. It’s just not in him.

“We got the money. We can just leave. It could end here.”

“He knows we’re not fucking dead, dumbass. He’s not gonna stop there.

“Please.” 

Since they’re walking on a tightrope of unfamiliarity, the best thing he could do was tone his words down so that they weren’t as outright affectionate.

Wouldn’t affect the guy to his knowledge, at least.

The ginger’s eyes flicker from his loaded, unlocked gun to the guy’s face. It feels like an hour of silence before he sets the gun away into his pocket.

“One condition.”

“I’m not sucking your dick.”

Pico only smirks.

* * *

“Fuck, I’m hungry,” Darnell exhales from the driver’s seat.

The reason why he’s always the one driving was because he was the most reliable. Nene couldn’t drive for shit, and Pico would just run everyone over from road-rage.

Keith is like an excited puppy, wriggling and unable to keep still when a certain brown-haired woman ducks into the car, sitting herself besides him.

They hug like some high school couple in the hallways.

It’s definitely gross, but Nene refuses to take her eyes off, snapping pictures and shit.

Pico, seated on the other side of Keith, mutters something about wanting to throw himself out of the car window while it’s moving.

Nene snaps at him to shut up. Darnell gets them out of the city in a hurry.

Keith’s leaning onto his girlfriend, just enjoying the comfort when her hand trails down his, gently grabbing his wrist.

The thing wasn’t wrapped in bandages but in thin, transparent plastic. You could see right through.

A black triangle was printed on his left wrist, reasonably still red and irritated.

“You got a tattoo?” She asks him, her voice soft and gentle in his ear.

Despite that fact, though, it makes Keith scared. He looks down at his swollen skin.

“Yeah.” 

She smiles. “Sweet.”

(A certain bloodstained briefcase is set on the floor in the backseat, right beneath Amelia’s seat.)


	14. Truce (Alt. Ending)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alternate ending!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This ending was completely made by user (Prefer Not To Say).
> 
> All the credits and kudos go to them, I just wrote the idea out since I loved it so much.

Keith’s standing back in the trio’s apartment, watching as his associate rummaged through what looked like a duffel bag. “He’s not gonna fall for it, Pico.”

“He will, just fucking trust me.”

The ginger indefinitely hadn’t meant anything deep by the sentence, but it still sent the younger into a fit of memories

(He trusted Pico this entire time, so why would this time be any different?)

Keith’s insides felt a bit off. He knew that he now lacked having a good judgement, or even one at all.

Pico turns around then, has the younger lay down on his stomach with his limbs lazily sprawled. Keith makes a nearly inaudible, exasperated sound along the way.

“Alright, now don’t move.”

“Huh? I’m already— FUCK!”

An exceedingly cold and thick pressure gushes over his back. Keith arches his spine at the feeling. Pico is quick to step a foot onto his shoulder and pin him right back down.

“I said hold the fuck still!”

“What the hell are you spilling on me?!”

“Fake blood, dipshit,” Pico would’ve sneered, if it wasn’t for the fact that the guy on the floor already looked wounded and dead. “You needa look dead.”

Keith grits his teeth together and tried his hardest to stay still. The feeling of liquid bleeding into his clothes and staining his skin, and also the carpet around them, was no less than uncomfortable. He mutters something, jaw pressed against the ground.

Pico makes a humming sound.

“I said, can you at least get your damn foot off me?”

“Oh... Sure.”

Pico removes his foot and places it back on the ground. He kneels then, so that his face is completely in view. Keith glares.

He tugged up his black sleeves, and then smoothed his palms down over the younger’s shoulders, palming down over his back momentarily and then swiped his ‘bloodied’ fingers onto the skin of Keith’s face.

“Dude, if I’m gonna be facedown—”

“Shut the fuck up for a minute.”

The ginger paints him with more faux blood for a few more minutes, and then stands back like he’s some artist finishing a product. He wipes his hand onto the clean parts of Keith’s clothes and then takes his phone out to snap a picture of the mess.

He’s busy typing a message that follows the photo when Keith sits up on his stained knees.

All that red was surely never coming out of the carpet. And this was an apartment room, also. He’d ask about that if only he didn’t know about the three planning to evade the town just after their little stunt.

He doesn’t try to pull himself off the floor just yet.

“Where’re you going?”

“To get the money.” Pico pockets his phone and grabs something out of the teen’s view. “You stay here and clean up.”

Keith makes a face at him. He wasn’t the one to have made the damn mess, so of course he’d only be upset about that. Nonetheless, he made for the shower.

He tries to ignore the emptiness in his stomach (the long rotting of perception in his gut).

The view of himself drenched in blood, splatter all over his jaw makes him feel sick. More specifically, the thought of how Amelia would feel if she ever found out what was happening.

What _he_ was agreeing to, to put it in better words.

She knows about most of it. She told him herself about being aware of the fact of how common it was for her father to send hitmen after her boyfriends.

She doesn’t know that they’ll be stealing her father’s black pocket money and then ditching her for the next state.

Keith knows he owes her, knows that she deserves way more than that.

She wanted _nothing more_ than to get away from her strict family, so the fact that he was initially leaving her with someone that killed people for fun to achieve those precise dreams was...

He scrambles with the lid of the toilet. (He’s always been a bit queasy with blood, fake or not.)

Keith spends the next thirty minutes in the tub, clothed, tousling at his hair.

He goes after the ginger once all the red is brutally scraped off.

* * *

Perhaps the world was either kind towards him or it’d been by pure coincidence, but Keith discovers the location (the one with a clearly stolen vehicle parked hastily in front).

The skin on his face is still tender. The biting edge of the wash sponge had scraped off all of the blood, which had been unreasonably difficult to take off.

(It was Halloween blood, why the fuck was it so hard to get rid of? And what did people even use the shit for?)

They’re in the development of handing over the loaded briefcase, one evidently happier than the other when Keith bursts through the door.

He’s immediately met with multiple widened, death glares. Maybe he shouldn’t have made such a loud entrance.

“I’m not dead,” he says, to no one in particular.

He’s positive that it’s directed towards Luis, though, but it’s a bit hard just looking at the guy with both such an unnatural towering height and gaze.

Several Luis’ standing in front of him couldn’t compare with the way Pico was scowling at him, however.

“We... we faked the death. We were gonna take your money and run off with it, but I couldn’t...”

Keith puts his hands up. “It’s wrong man, I... I just couldn’t. Please don’t kill me.”

Luis’ eyes slowly flicker towards the ginger.

“Keith, what the fuck are you doing?” Pico snaps at him.

Keith flinches. It’s a tone he’s never, ever heard from the guy, brimming with just sheer, unfeigned anger.

He’s vandalized shit, he’s painted this guy’s workplace building, Keith would gladly admit to all that, with no problem at that.

It couldn’t compare to what the other man’s done, or even the father, but he’s made aware right then by no one other than himself, that although he’s scared (a _fucking coward_ in Pico’s eyes), he’s still a kid with a good heart.   
  


The words come out brittle, shaking, leaves a chilling tension in the room, but it was inevitable, like everything else that’s ever happened. “I’m... I was dating your daughter, and, well... y’know.”

All it takes is for Keith to gesture towards the ginger and Luis catches on. They’re not aware of the fourth presence dithering in the hallway.

“You befriended the kid I told you to _kill_?” He sneers at Pico.

Pico’s gives the guy a disgusted look. Luis snatches back the briefcase and Pico doesn’t even try to fight it. The guy’s twice his size. It’d be useless.

Pico thinks this whole situation is useless, really.

He approaches Keith, who’s practically quivering in those borrowed clothes Pico’s given him, and strikes him across his jaw.

Keith holds his mouth and his jaw, red already starting to spill. He catches a glimpse of familiar metal, the kind that shimmers in both sunlight and moonlight.

Pico wouldn’t do that, though. He wouldn’t kill him, so Keith shouldn’t be scared. But then why was it there? Doesn’t he like him?

The ginger eliminates the space made between them from the blow.

He’s all over him like he had been in the car when they were kissing and shit.

He lowly says, against his ear, “I really liked you, you know that, right, Keithy? Why’d you have to go and fuck shit up?”

Keith wants so desperately to respond, to tell the man who sort of did deserve an explanation, or at least an answer, but the ache in his jaw hurts too much, he couldn’t.

He’s stuck staring into his light eyes, which, for once this entire time he’s been alive, wasn’t hazy from drugs but was now glossy with emotion.

It makes Keith want to cry. He nearly does.

When Pico aims and shoots, Keith closing his eyes to accept his fate as an apology for the betrayal, two gunshots pierce the air, not one.

There wasn’t any excruciating pain in Keith’s stomach as he would’ve imagined it to be. Perhaps that one shot had killed him?

When he opens his eyes (realizes he isn’t dead), Pico’s nursing his shooting arm with the other hand, his gun clattering to the ground from the force.

Blood pours out of his pale skin, through his dark sleeves, staining the carpet.

That’d definitely be hard to clean out later.

Keith heard someone or something tell him to run, so he does. He catches the ginger bending back down in an instant with lightning-fast speed, snatching his gun with his unwounded hand.

He gets out of the house, a girl dressed in red on his heels.

More gunshots shoot throughout the house, all in the air outside, but Keith doesn’t get any instinct to go back and save the guy who’s fallen in love with him from a distance.

Maybe that was a good thing.

* * *

The windows of the sugary diner are fogged up by the cold weather.

Even from a distance inside, you could see that it began to snow, although relatively sparse.

Amelia serves him a glass bowl of vanilla ice cream, his favorite. She doesn’t expect him to eat it, weeping to himself like that, so she goes around the counter and sits herself down next to him.

He immediately puts her arms around her, wet face soaking her neck and the front of her dress.

The kid wasn’t just crying. Indistinguishable words poured out of his mouth like water (or blood), sounding suspiciously like apologies for more then just one person, all pressed together into a broken sob.

The guilt is unmanageable, splits him open on a spear.

And she knows that.

Amelia lifts him by his chin, dripping with tears like a slanted roof beneath rain, presses her lipstick-painted lips to his own dry pair with delicacy, something Pico’s never done.

Of course, even though he’s halfway traumatized and just breaking down into pieces from all the emotions in his skin, he looks up at her wide-eyed.

“First time?” She smiled, hugging and handling him with tenderness.

“From you? ... Yeah, I guess it is.”

Keith breaks out with the smallest smile, the first’s he made that entire evening. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> End.
> 
> Would anyone be interested in a fnf request fic where y’all can just send requests in and I’ll write em? Cause I actually really fuckin love y’all’s ideas ngl. Y’all cute <3


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